CARBON HILL

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

The usual disclaimers apply:

I retain all copy rights to my own work.

Any resemblance to any person, living or dead, is accidental, coincidental and unintentional.

 

CARBON HILL

1. GHOST TOWN

Sheriff Linn Keller stopped what he was doing.

He stopped and leaned back in his office chair, and looked around his Inner Sanctum, his office, at the back of the stone Sheriff’s Office.

To the right of the doorway, about head height, was a framed revolver behind glass, a Victory model Smith and Wesson his grandfather carried as town marshal of Trimble, back in Ohio.

Six rounds of .38 Smith and Wesson round nose lead stood on a popsicle stick shelf behind the glass and under the slender barrel.

Linn smiled a little as he remembered his Mama telling him about his Grampa, her father, and then his eyes hardened as she told him of being a girl at home and how her mother tried to throw out the folded flag after the man’s funeral, tried to throw out his sidearm and badge and gunbelt as well, and how she’d rescued them – and used the revolver to kill a rapist that preyed on pretty little girls.

His eyelids lowered to half mast and his hands tightened slowly as she described how the perv came at her, there in the nighttime dark, and how she told him to go away, to leave her alone, and she described his expression as he looked at her in her pinafore and saddle shoes, and how she brought the revolver up out of the pleats in her skirt and drove six of her Daddy’s rounds right up through his diaphragm.

She told her son in quiet voice that it was the first time she felt her eyes go pale.

Linn’s eyes swung to the right, to a framed print, a print taken from a glass plate exposure: two lawmen, both with those ice-pale eyes, one with an iron-grey mustache, the other with a good, rich, Clan Maxwell auburn lip broom: there was a third figure, and Linn swallowed hard to see it, for though he knew this was his thrice-great-grandmother, Sarah Lynne McKenna, she was the very image of his own mother, and he blinked the sting from his pale eyes to look at her.

He didn’t move as the door opened and a shadow came in, the shadowed bulk of his chief deputy: the blocky Navajo laid a hand on his shoulder and said, “Boss, leave.”

Linn’s jaw thrust out, slowly, and Barrents squeezed the Sheriff’s shoulder just a little, enough to say I’m here, I’m listening.

Linn took a long, slow breath, then nodded.

The Sheriff stood, slowly, unfolding his long, tall frame from the armless swivel chair.

“I relieve you, sir,” Barrents said formally.

“I stand relieved,” Linn replied, a ritual they practiced in such moments.

Barrents stood aside and Linn reached up, picked up his Stetson, worked it down onto his head, reached for the door.

He stopped.

Linn drew his hand back, slowly, then turned.

Pale eyes looked into obsidian-black eyes and Linn nodded again.

“Thank you,” he said, his voice uncharacteristically husky.

Barrents winked.

The door closed behind the Sheriff, leaving Barrents alone in the Sheriff’s inner office.

He turned and looked at the glass-plate print, looked at the pale eyed young woman glaring at the camera like she’d enjoy taking an ax to it.

Barrents never said a word to the still figure, but he nodded as if the two shared an understanding of some kind.

Linn paused long enough to sweep up the stack of cards Cindy had stacked on the corner of her desk.

Sympathy cards at his Mama’s death were still coming in, cards with a shocking variety of postmarks.

Cindy knew Linn was answering every last one of them with a personal note, hand written, and she’d gotten it from Linn’s wife that the man would sit at their kitchen table with a bottle of ink, a dip quill, and write by the light of a single beeswax taper.

Cindy bit her bottom lip at the mental image.

His mother – Willamina, who’d been Sheriff before him – had done the same when Barrents’ father, her chief deputy, died.

She watched the Sheriff’s backside retreat out the heavy glass doors; he hit the remote unlock on his Jeep, reached in to stack the cards on the passenger seat before getting in himself.

Like many men who’ve just lost part of themselves to death, Linn was restless: unlike most men, he knew what he needed to do, and so he saddled his Appaloosa gelding, loaded four sandwiches, a bag of jerky, a canteen of water and a thermos of coffee: so provisioned, and with a rifle in the scabbard, and his engraved revolvers at his belt in lieu of the Sheriff’s black-plastic Glock, he gave his Apple-horse a nudge and headed him generally east, across the back pasture.

The Lady Esther breathed easy on the down grade, coasting into the carefully-restored Carbon Hill depot.

It was carefully restored in that the depot platform was structurally sound, the dispatcher’s office had a tight roof and a working stove, and nobody was going to fall through the floor.

Beyond that, it was as warped, bleached, dusty and dead looking as the rest of the town.

Firelands, from its inception, was an exception.

The stereotype of a Western town is one of decay: boards dried with altitude, sun and time, warped and twisted and dirty, windows broken and buildings gutted, leaning, falling in on themselves.

Carbon Hill was like this, for real.

There were a few areas restored for the tourist trade, but it was nothing like the clean walks and bright, fresh paint that had been Firelands’ appearance since the Old Sheriff came into town, twenty years after That Damned War, and had remained clean and freshly painted ever since.

There were two mining engineers on the Tourism Committee, Linn knew, and they’d specified how the remaining Carbon Hill coal mine portal should be reinforced, and how far back the tourists could go in their ore cars, overhauled with seats instead of rock dust: there were lights on the sides of the cars, with batteries inside, big Caterpillar bulldozer batteries, as long as the bed of a pickup truck and strong enough to turn over a cold Diesel engine on a frosty morning, with more than enough reserve to power the lights and a built-in 110-volt inverter as necessary.

Linn cantered into town on his Appaloosa as the tourists discharged from the pin-striped red passenger car and milled about on the platform.

A little boy pointed: “Look, Mommy! A ghost!”

“That’s not a ghost,” his mother gently corrected him, and Linn could not help but smile a little as the lad protested “But this is a ghost town and ghosts live in a ghost town!”

I don’t doubt there are, Linn thought, smiling a little. Now, if I were a ghost, where would I hide?

Linn turned his horse and walked away from the cheerful young woman in a McKenna gown, giving them the tourist-guide lecture his Mama usually gave. After retirement, the former Sheriff became a driving force behind the tourist trade; she always wore a McKenna gown, she always appeared in character as a woman of about 1885, and her words wove a spell of fascination as she described Firelands, and what it was, and how it got there, and she’d come over to Carbon on the tourist train as well, in order to explain that dirty little coal-mining town, and how it contrasted with their clean, prosperous, brightly-painted Firelands.

Linn closed his eyes, his fists tightening until he felt two knuckles crack and his arm start to shiver.

“Hey mister!”

Linn opened his eyes and saw a dirty, grinning boy in a man’s shirt much too large for him, ragged overalls and a wore out pair of miner’s boots, squinting happily up at him.

The lad had a happy, little-boy grin, and a bottle of beer in each hand.

He extended one, and Linn leaned down, took it.

“Thank you, son,” he said gently, and the grinning boy flipped the wire bail back on his own, wiggled the cork – it popped audibly as it pushed free of the constricting bottle’s neck – and the lad tilted the bottle and drank with an obvious appetite.

Linn flipped the bail on his own and was rewarded with the cork’s noisy exit: he, too, took a long drink.

Part of his mind recognized that the tourists probably thought this a part of their tour, living models in a weathered tableau.

Frankly, he didn't care what they thought: he was a thirsty man, and the beer was good.

It was no beer he was really familiar with, and it was stronger – a porter, maybe, or even a stout – but he was dry, and the beer was cool and wet: man and boy both drank until each respective bottle was empty.

Linn leaned down and extended the empty to the boy.

“Thank you, son,” he said with grave courtesy. “I needed that.”

The lad belched loudly. “Me too!” he declared, then, taking the Sheriff’s empty, ducked under Apple’s nose and scampered across the street to what used to be a Mercantile.

He lifted a warped plank on the board walk, quickly stashed the two empties, dropped the board: he looked over his shoulder and the Sheriff saw his eyes change, as if he saw some danger.

The Sheriff turned Apple-horse, his hand on his revolver’s grip.

There was nothing there.

He turned back and the boy was gone.

Eyes narrowed, he walked Apple over to the boardwalk.

The dirt next to the boardwalk was undisturbed.

Frowning, Linn dismounted, ignoring the stares of the tourists.

He drew a line in the dirt with his boot toe.

Light, dusty, perfect for taking a track, he thought.

Why aren’t the boy’s prints here?

He hooked two fingers under the board, lifted.

There were several bottles beneath.

He frowned, looking right and left under the board walk.

Every bottle there was bone dry – every stopper was out and dangling and none showed the least trace of moisture – and every last bottle was thickly covered by dust.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

2. MOVING DAY

Linn looked around the living room, remembering.

He’d grown up here.

His father, his mother, himself, his big brother …

“Now I’m all that’s left,” he whispered. “Just me.”

His wife gripped his upper arm, leaned into her sorrowing husband’s shoulder.

“You’re not alone,” she said softly, the way she usually spoke.

“I know,” Linn almost groaned, running his arm around his wife’s shoulders. “I’ve got us.” He looked over at their little boy, asleep on the couch. “I’ve got us and ten thousand memories.”

“What about ghosts?” his wife asked innocently, and that was just the nudge he needed: Linn laughed, quietly, and hugged his wife a little tighter.

“Oh, yeah,” he said offhandedly. “There are always ghosts.”

“For real?” His wife’s eyes were concerned, and Linn turned to face his bride, and caressed her cheek with his bent forefinger.

"Between my ears, yes, plenty of 'em."

Linn pointed to his Mama’s roll top desk.

“I see Mama settin’ there,” he said, with a little catch in his voice. “I see her reading journals and letters and scrolling through microfiche records on her laptop. I look over here” – he pointed to the window – “and I see my Pa, outside, running that ridin’ mower wide open and laughing. Over there” – he turned, thrust his chin toward the spotless kitchen – “I see … I see a thousand memories of all of us, my brother, my …”

He swallowed, blinked.

“Mama left this place to us. She said there’s no sense to rent when …”
He dropped his head, looked at the hook rug underfoot, and its memories, and bit his bottom lip.

“She said it’s time Sheriff Linn Keller lived in Sheriff Linn Keller’s house again.”

Connie looked up at her long tall husband and caressed his cheek, twisted the curl of his handlebar mustache, blinked as she felt her strong, capable husband crumble inside.

Sheriff Linn Keller, blooded warrior, chief law enforcement officer for the county, a man who in his lifetime had been shot, stabbed, cut, been run into, run over, a man who’d faced up to and faced down a variety of large and angry people with a variety of weapons – a man who’d died and been sent back, by his own words, “because my work wasn’t done” – her big and strong husband, father to their child, this man who wore more than a century of lawman's heritage like a superhero wears a cloak –

Sheriff Linn Keller buried his face in his wife’s shoulder and she felt him convulse, locking the sounds of a strong man’s grief behind his closed throat, forbidding them to emerge.

She felt scalding tears burn through the shoulder of her flannel shirt, she felt her husband’s arms tighten with the desperate grip of a drowning man clutching a life-ring.

When he was finally able to choke out a coherent message, it was not the warm, confident voice she was so used to.

It was the voice of a lost little boy, a voice full of tears, barely able to whisper, “I miss my Mama.”

Connie did not know what to say, but in such moments the wise wife will speak without words, and she did: she held her husband as he grieved almost inaudibly into her shoulder.

Still waters run deep, she knew, and when her husband loved, he loved with all the depths of his very soul, and he grieved just as hard: at his mother’s funeral, what little Connie remembered being spoken was a line from their old friend, the Abbott from the Rabbitville monastery: “When we grieve, it’s because we have loved. When we grieve hard, it's because we’ve have loved deeply.”

When Linn loved, she knew, he loved very deeply, and she knew her husband was grieving his mother's death just as hard, just as deeply, as he’d loved her.

 

Like many men, Linn tried to bury his grief in work.

It was perhaps good that there were large and heavy burdens to be brought in.

They had little by way of furniture, but they had everything else that comprises a household: he punished himself by carrying more than he should have, or so Connie saw it, punishing himself for his Mama’s death.

Linn, of course, saw it as work that needed done, and he tackled into it with his usual single minded focus, reveling in his ability to haul and pack and force these burdens to his will.

They had almost all their goods stacked in the living room and the bedrooms when the phone rang.

Connie got to the phone while her husband came thundering down the stairs with his utter and complete lack of stealth: his descent more resembled the enthusiastic gallop of a herd bull, and Connie couldn’t help but smile a little, looking at their little boy, for her husband charged downstairs like his mother described he’d done when he too was a little boy.

Connie cupped her hand over her mouth as she handed Linn the receiver, and she turned away, blinking rapidly.

The memory took her by surprise, and she discovered that she, too, missed her pale-eyed mother-in-law, her Willamina.

She missed her bad.

Linn took the receiver from her extended hand.

“Sheriff Keller.”

Linn’s voice was brisk, businesslike, the way it always was when he answered the phone.

He frowned a little.

“I’ll be right there.”

He leaned over, set the receiver gently on the hook, took his wife’s shoulders, squeezed them as if squeezing them together.

It was their private signal, one he often used in public.

If he didn’t want to kiss his wife and tell her he loved her, out in front of God and everybody, he’d squeeze her shoulders a little like this, saying his sentiment without words.

“Got to go,” he murmured.

Connie raised her arm across her chest, patted his hand. “Be careful.”

He kissed her under the earlobe, nibbling the side of her neck.

“Hey, cowboy,” she purred, “I’ll give you a week to stop that.”

Linn would have slapped her bottom, except for a bright pair of pale blue eyes regarding them from the couch: instead, he winked at their little boy, then crossed the room with a quick, light step, slung his gunbelt around his lean middle, plucked his Stetson off its peg and headed out the door.

 

The woman turned as the dispatcher’s eyes swung toward the heavy glass double doors.

A tall man, broad of shoulder and lean of waist, pushed through, a big grin and a big Stetson hat taking equal claim of his head: he wore blue jean and cowboy boots, a denim jacket and a pair of cowboy revolvers.

He looked more like a rancher or a rodeo regular than a lawman, especially when he spun off the jacket, slung it with careless ease onto the halltree that looked like it had been liberated from some maiden aunt’s immaculate Victorian mansion.

Cindy rose. “Sheriff Keller,” she said formally, “this is Wilma Kincaid. She’s a …”

She looked at the visitor in her pantsuit and jacket, thought for a moment, frowning.

“She’s a researcher.”

“You and my mother,” the Sheriff said heartily, whipping his Stetson off and thrusting it under his off arm: he took her extended hand in a surprisingly firm grip, turned it so Wilma’s palm was down, then raised her knuckles to his lips in a perfectly courtly and most unexpectedly gentlemanly knuckle-kiss.

“I’m sorry, Sheriff,” the woman said, realizing this wasn’t going at all like she’d expected, “your secretary tells me you’re moving. I … didn’t mean to interrupt, I know it’s a lot of work –“

The Sheriff held up a hand, effectively shutting off her nervous flow of words.

“It’s a lot of work, I needed to take a rest, and Cindy is my dispatcher, not my secretary.” His tone was gentle, his eyes smiled as he said it, taking any reproof out of his correction: “She’s the top sergeant here and she gets things done. She is the brain and the nerve center, if it’s to be known, she knows it, and I could not get along without her. Isn’t that right?”

His expression as he looked at his dispatcher was so guileless, so innocent, that all three of them laughed, for in so saying, the Sheriff not only corrected rank and status, he also broke the ice, got a chuckle and showed himself to be full of second hand horse feed when the occasion demanded.

And he wraps another one around his little finger, Cindy thought, glaring at the pale eyed lawman. “If I’m so valuable, how about a raise?” she snapped, and the Sheriff laughed.

“I’ll buy you a beer when you’re 99. Now, Ms. Kincaid, you are a researcher, and you are in Firelands County, Colorado. You’ve come to the Sheriff’s office, and in my experience that tells me you believe we have information you can use.”

“Yes, I …”

Wilma Kincaid wet her lips, then plunged ahead as if jumping off a tall cliff into a deep pool.

“I’m a ghost hunter.”

Wilma was standing beside the dispatcher’s desk and so could not see any look Cindy may have given the Sheriff, but she could not miss the expression in the Sheriff’s eyes, and it surprised her very much to see that he was not in the least surprised.

“I think,” he said slowly, “that you should follow me.”

“The usual, Sheriff?” Cindy asked.

“Yes, please,” Linn replied, then stepped back, motioned Kincaid to the back of the Sheriff’s office. “This way.”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

3. REVELATION

 

Wilma Kincaid found the man’s manners immaculate.

He opened doors for her, he drew out a chair for her, he hung his hat and sat on a chair beside her – turning it to face her – rather than use his desk to maintain an official separation.

Since he’d said that she should follow him, she knew he had something in mind, and so she waited for his opening statement.

Wilma Kincaid was no stranger to such research, nor was she unaccustomed to rejection; as a matter of fact, the only enthusiastic, or less than hostile, receptions she’d had were from those sorts politely known as “Less than Credible.”

The Sheriff frowned a little, leaning forward, elbows on his knees, rubbing his palms slowly together, clearly ordering his thoughts.

“Miss Kincaid,” he said slowly, then looked up, his eyes bright, almost amused – “Let’s start over here. How do you prefer to be called?”

“I, um, huh?” – then, “I’m sorry…. what?”

Linn laughed, an easy, relaxed chuckle. “First off, I am happily married and I’m not about to put the moves on you. Second, call me Sheriff, think of it as a name and not a title. I would address you in the manner you prefer. Miss, Ms., Mrs., Hey You, whatever suits your fancy.”

“Wilma will do fine,” she said faintly.

He stood. “Good enough.” He stepped behind the desk, raised his hand, tapped the barrel of an obviously old Winchester rifle. “This rifle belonged to my four-times-great grandfather. I am named after him. That Sheriff Linn Keller carried this very rifle and used it to good effect.” He lowered his hand, tinkled his fingernails against the Damascus barrel of an equally ancient shotgun.

“He carried this. Called it his Two Pipe Shoot Gun. I’ve used it.” He looked at the researcher with veiled eyes. “A man came in the front doors and intended to kill as many of us as he could. My mother was Sheriff before I was and she took this gun and blew the son-of-a –“

His hand closed into a sudden, hard, white-knuckled fist and he closed his eyes, but not before she saw them turn cold and hard and very, very pale.

Wilma Kincaid had never heard of this particular Western Sheriff.

She had no idea he was known as Old Pale Eyes.

She had absolutely no inkling that the look she’d barely seen was the look some men took to Hell as the very last thing they saw on this earth.

Linn cleared his throat.

“I’ve used this double gun in some pretty bad situations, and my Mama used it to kill a man out in our lobby. Over there” – he pointed – “in that glass frame is the revolver my father carried the night he was murdered. Line of duty death.” He took a few steps over to the wall, tapped a gentle knuckle against the framed print.

“Come over here.”

Wilma Kincaid rose, curious.

“Look closely at this photograph. This was taken from an old glass plate. Are you familiar with glass plate photography, Ms. Kincaid?”

Wilma blinked at the sudden wall of formality.

Something told her the man was hiding something.

“I know … I know they used glass or tin plates.”

Linn nodded, staring at that picture.

“Here.” He took the picture down, turned it toward her, held it under his chin. “Look close.”

Wilma studied the photograph.

“Look at the detail,” she breathed.

“Glass plate photography used a relatively thick emulsion and long exposure times. This gave a very saturated image, a very clearly detailed image. We’ve enlarged this one, but for now, look at the man on the left, the man in front of the red mare.”

Wilma looked up, confused. “It’s black-and-white.”

“The mare is red, the man’s shirt is blue, the other man’s shirt is dark red and the woman’s dress is a rich, royal blue.”

His voice caught and he turned his face away, biting his bottom lip hard.

“Look at the man on the left,” he said in a husky voice, then he looked at her.

She looked closely at the image and he saw her pupils dilate and her jaw drop.

She looked at him, her eyes very wide.

“Now look at the woman. Look very close.”

She did.

“Got a good look? Mental snapshot?”

She nodded, her mouth still open, her face a little pale.

Linn turned, hung the picture back on its nail, then turned and gripped her shoulders gently.

“I normally don’t touch another woman without a legal purpose, but this is personal.” He looked her in the eye, squeezed gently. “I am not the man in the picture.”

Her mouth closed, then opened.

“My hands on your shoulders prove I am not a ghost. I look just like that man, only his mustache is iron grey and mine’s not there yet.” He turned, bent, opened the bottom right, then the bottom left drawers of his desk, withdrew an album.

“Take another look at the woman in the dress.”

He opened the cover, turned a page, turned another.

“Got the look?”

“Yes.”

“Now look here.”

It was a split image, an 8x10 turned on its side.

On the left, the woman in the black-and-white picture on the wall.

Beside it, the same woman, the same ice-pale eyes –

Wilma looked up at the Sheriff, a new realization –

“Your eyes –“

The Sheriff nodded.

“This woman” – he tapped the left half of the print, the black-and-white image – “is my thrice-great-grandmother, Sarah Lynne McKenna. She was the woods colt, the illegitimate daughter of Old Pale Eyes.” He pointed to the framed print, back in its place on the wall. “The man for whom I was named.”

He looked at his visitor with a quiet smile.

“I could be a latter-day twin.”

He pointed to the other lawman, the one regarding the camera with a steady gaze.

“That is his chief deputy and son, Jacob Keller.”

He looked back at Wilma, his expression unreadable.

“My son’s name is Jacob, and he has pale eyes.”

“The woman … your great … how does …?”

Linn tapped the right hand photograph.

“Same dress.”
She nodded.

“Same eyes.”

She nodded again, looked up, puzzled.

“Same woman?”

Wilma’s mouth opened a little.

The Sheriff’s voice inflected upwards.

He hadn’t made a statement.

It was a question.

Why a question?

“It … looks like her,” she said slowly.

“This is my thrice-great-grandmother,” Linn said, his finger gentle on the left image. “And this is my mother.”

Wilma’s gaze dropped to the image, her mouth open again, and she looked up at the Sheriff, excited.

“Oh my God,” she whispered. “She … and you? …

“You’re looking for ghosts,” the Sheriff said. “You’ve come to the right place.”

He looked again at the framed print. “The Old Sheriff’s first wife was named Connie.” He looked back at the ghost hunter. “My wife’s name is Connie. His wife and their little girl were killed by smallpox, back East, two weeks after his discharge from surviving what he called That Damned War. We know it is the Un-Civil War.” He sat back in the chair facing the researcher. “His son’s name was Jacob. My son’s name is Jacob. He was Sheriff, I am Sheriff. I live in the house he built. This, where we sit, is actually back away from the street a distance from where his desk was, but this” – he knocked the desk top with gentle knuckles – “was his desk. That’s not his chair, though.” Linn’s smile was gentle, as if sharing a family secret. “The Old Sheriff had bad luck with chairs. They only had four legs in those days and they fell over easily, he liked to kick his feet up on the corner of the desk, and he ended up flat on his back with his boots pointed toward the ceiling more times than one. He’d get mad and throw the chair out in the street and take the ax to it, he’d feed it to the wood stove and fetch out another chair.”

“No!” Wilma was almost laughing at the Sheriff’s quietly enthusiastic delivery.

“Oh, yeah. He had a standing order for chairs with the local Mercantile.”

She looked around the office, her expression somewhere between deer-in-the-headlights, and kid-at-Christmas, regarding all these artifacts that were probably charged like a solar battery, just brimming with detectable energies.

“Tell me” – the Sheriff regarded her with open curiosity – “what brought you out here, anyway? Firelands is hardly your ghost hunter’s mecca.”

Wilma’s mouth was a little dry, all of a sudden, and she tried to swallow, then cleared her throat, tried again.

“Sheriff, I … I came out here to … just as a tourist. I’d heard about your train, and … I thought it would be nice to see the mountains.” She looked almost hopefully at the patiently listening lawman. “It is every bit as gorgeous as the flyers and the brochures and the web page, and it was worth every cent, and …”

She swallowed again.

“Sheriff, I was on the train yesterday when it went to Carbon Hill.”

The Sheriff’s face was carefully neutral, but her quick ear picked up the change in his voice when he said quietly, “Go on.”

“There was a dirty little boy over there, and a man on a horse.”

He nodded.

“I … think there was something … odd … about that boy.”

“How’s that?”

“He handed the man on the horse a bottle of beer.”

The Sheriff nodded.

“He drank one and I know he wasn’t old enough to drink and then he looked across the street like he was afraid of something.”

The Sheriff nodded again, his eyes on hers.

“He … I couldn’t see where he went, but Sheriff, it looked like someone was running out of … someone was coming after him. He turned his head to look, and when the man on the horse turned, it scared the other fellow off.”

“Describe this other fellow.”

“He was … unshaven. He wore a dirty white apron and he was fat and he looked … greasy, like he hadn’t had a bath in a long time.”

Linn nodded.

“Go on.”

“That was … when we got back on the train.”

“Did you see anything else?”

“I could hear the telegraph through the window, I saw the man inside … a younger man, he wore” – she gripped her arm, just above the bicep – “oh, those things men wore on their sleeves.”

“Sleeve garters.”

“Those. And a vest, and a string tie. He wore a green … like the bill of a cap.”

“Eyeshade. Telegraphers commonly wore those.”

“Exactly.”

Linn leaned back and steepled his fingers.

“The horseman?”

“I couldn’t … he …”

Wilma frowned, looked down at the floor.

“I didn’t pay much attention to him. A cowboy, he …”

“I was the horseman.”

Her surprise was immediate, genuine.

“And the beer was good. A little different, but good.”

Her mouth made a little round O of surprise.

“But there’s something I don’t understand, Ms. Kincaid.”

The Sheriff frowned, remembering.

“The boy ran across the street, lifted a loose board on the boardwalk, set his empties in under the boardwalk, then he ran down the alley and he was gone.”

“I didn’t see that,” Wilma admitted.

Linn took a long breath in through his nose. “I got down and looked at the ground. The dirt was soft, light, fluffy, an ant would leave a track plain as a bulldozer.” He looked up at Wilma Kincaid, his eyes pale. “There were no tracks.

“I lifted the board. There were at least a dozen, maybe two dozen bottles, and not a one of them had the least trace of wet. The top one should have, he’d just drunk from it. Every last one had dust on ‘em and no sign of having been disturbed for the past century.”

He rose.

“How would you like to go back to Carbon Hill?”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

3. INSPECTION

 

Wilma Kincaid giggled like an excited little girl.

The restored inspection car gleamed in the shadowed roundhouse: smoke and steam hissed up the stack and through the telescoping vent that had been lowered to the stubby diamond stack protruding through the car’s roof.

“It’s gorgeous!” she squeaked, and the Sheriff grinned at her.

“It should be,” he chuckled. “It cost quite a bit … both money … and an awful lot of just plain work!”

“We’re going to ride in it?”

“Yep.”

“It … runs itself? It doesn’t need an engine?”

Linn laughed.

“This is a President’s car,” he explained. “It has a steam boiler and drivers just like a locomotive. It’s self propelled, it has a 125 mile range – it has that much of a water tank and that much coal capacity – and she’ll get us to Carbon and back easily.”

“Can we go in?” she asked timidly.

Linn laughed, put his hand between her shoulder blades, easing her forward. “It’ll be kind of hard to ride if we don’t!”

Engineer and fireman looked back as the pair climbed the cast-iron steps: Wilma saw the interior brighten, through the windows, as the big, heavy doors rolled aside: steam was up, the pop-off hissed angrily, steam filled the pistons and they began to move.

Wilma settled into a chair in back, looking around curiously: the Sheriff rose, gripped a cloth curtain, looked up at the rail it ran on.

“Before you ask,” he said, drawing the curtain out, then the other, forming a cozy little isolated compartment, “this is the comfort station.” He slid the curtains back, then raised what had appeared to be a comfortably upholstered bench.

It concealed the familiar shape of a … toilet seat.

“Facilities were as primitive as they were practical,” he commented. “Other than being drafty, it worked well for the age.”

“You’re kidding.” Wilma’s eyes were big, surprised, and she raised a hand to her mouth to cover her nervous laughter.

“No. Not kidding a bit. We have fold down bunks, a small kitchen, not all the comforts of home but I’ve overnighted in this very car.” He stopped and Wilma saw the shadow of a memory cross behind his pale eyes. “This was my Mama’s favorite –“

He looked aside, quickly, then rose, turned to face the door, hands thrust into his hip pockets.

He turned. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I … things are complicated.”

“Sheriff,” the fireman called, head and shoulders thrust through the doorway.

“Excuse me.” The Sheriff went forward.

Wilma looked past the lawman.

She could not see much but she could see the fireman opening a small door in the front of the car, step out onto a small platform.

She took a step closer, coming up on tiptoes to look over the tall lawman’s shoulder: not succeeding at this (tall he was, tall she was not), she leaned to the side and saw someone standing beside the tracks, holding what looked like a square, green-canvas bag with a loop on top the size of a basketball.

The fireman leaned out, snagged the loop, brought it back in: he drove his hand into the bag, brought out an envelope.

He hung the bag on a hook – she could see but little, and couldn’t see where the hook was, but he hung it one something – she saw the man open the envelope, unfold a paper.

The man read, blinked, his mouth opening: he read it again, then looked up.

The Sheriff waited, knowing something was in the wind: it had to be important, to send a runner ahead with a pickup bag and a message.

The Sheriff extended his hand to accept the paper.

Wilma saw the fireman’s hand was shaking a little.

The Sheriff read the page, read it again, his jaw thrusting out a little: his complexion was already very fair – not just Caucasian, but Celtic Caucasian, Wilma had thought to herself when she met the man – Celtic, or perhaps Nordic.

Fair the man’s skin was already, but now the color drained from his face … steadily, until he had skin the shade of bleached parchment, and stretched over his cheek bones.

He looked at Wilma Kincaid and his eyes were pale, ice pale, the shade of a glacier’s heart.

“My daughter,” he said, his throat tight, “is in trouble.”

“Your daughter?”

“Sheriff Marnie Keller, Second Martian District.” The Sheriff’s lips felt wooden and a little tingly, and he laid the single page on the side table.

“This was taken from an intercept. Someone screwed up. They were supposed to wait for the incident to finish before advising Mission Control.”

“What happened?” Wilma crossed the slightly swaying floor, knelt before the increasingly silent lawman.

Linn blinked, then took her hands and stood, bringing her up with him.

“I kneel before no man,” he said, “and no one kneels before me. Please, Ms. Kincaid, a seat if you please.”

The Sheriff waited until Wilma was seated, then turned to the desk, drew open a concealed writing surface, lifted the lid and pulled out paper, an ink-bottle, a pen.

He dipped the pen, wiped the excess on the inside of the bottle’s neck, closed his eyes for a long moment, then began to write.

Is this what it was like then? Wilma wondered.

Back when his four-times-great grandfather rode in … did he ride in this car?

Did he write with that pen?

Am I seeing what was, or seeing it play out again?

 

Linn set the paper back, away from the edge, weighted the corner with the ink-bottle, eased the pennyhead glass stopper back into its neck: he produced a small cloth from somewhere, probably the hidden drawer, wiped the pen, placed it in its felt-lined bed.

“I feel like I’m intruding,” Wilma said hesitantly.

“You are,” Linn said bluntly, “and I am grateful for it.”

He turned hard and pale eyes toward her.

“My mother is not long dead and I am grieving her. My little girl was launched the hell and gone clear to Mars. There’s a murderer that’s killed two deputies and now I’m told she’s been killed, then a follow-up that said her flitter was hit and she’s critically injured.” He turned his hard gaze to the nearest window and Wilma was honestly afraid the window would shatter from the intensity of his glare.

“I am her father,” he said slowly. “A father should be able to fix it. I should be … it’s my job” – he hissed the word – “it’s my job to keep her safe –“

He lowered his face into his hands, took a long, shoulder raising breath.

Wilma expected him to groan.

She expected the heart-rending groan of a helpless father, facing his daughter’s death.

He did not groan.

What he gave was more of a growl, a sustained, low, menacing rumble that was altogether, quietly, unmistakably, terrifying.

Wilma did not know quite what to do, so she raised her head and looked at the few lines of precisely-executed copperplate script, gleaming-wet on good rag paper.

 

TO MARS CONTROL NASA

FROM SHERIFF L KELLER FIRELANDS COUNTY COLORADO

RE ATTACK/DEATH SHERIFF M KELLER 2d MARTIAN DISTRICT

 

CAN MUSTER AS MANY LAWMEN AS NECESSARY

ADVISE SOONEST

 

LK

 

Wilma jumped as the whistle pierced the cold Colorado air.

Surprised, she looked up, saw the Carbon Hill depot slide into view beside the car.

 

His name had been Richard, at least when he was born.

He didn’t have much of a family life and he had to scrounge from the earliest possible moment just to feed himself.

He got tagged with “Little Dickie” and then just “Dickie,” which his younger sibling could not pronounce.

It came out “Tickie.”

In later years, when his skill at theft proved the means to fill his belly, the name took on a double meaning, referring to his “Tickie Pingers.”

Tickie heard the barkeep and the fat, ugly woman arguing again, and he slid in the half-open door that never latched properly: he knew the barkeep would be throwing his hands down, palms up, and he knew the woman would be thrusting a stiff forefinger at his nose, and he knew the two would be shouting so loudly neither could hear the other, and while they were distracted, he picked up a beer

bottle with his left hand, another with his right, gripping them tightly, holding them close against his dirty, oversized shirt.

Silently, keeping low, he backed out the door, turned, scampered across the street, then froze.

That pale eyed lawman was standing there.

Tickie did the only thing he could think of.

He thrust one of those bottles of beer at the tall, lean, pale-eyed lawman, a desperate offering to this icon of uncompromising justice.

 

The fireman was fluent in CW: he took the Sheriff’s hand written message, unlocked the telegraph office, turned on the solar powered lights, placed the sheet on the slightly dusty green blotter.

He threw the old-fashioned double-blade knife switch, gripped the key’s button between thumb and middle fingers, his index finger atop the black, gutta-percha button, tapped out CH.

He knew Firelands’ dispatcher would catch the clatter and would reply, and he knew Cripple Creek and the other depots would be listening as well.

CN FL came the return message, a series of precisely spaced clicks and clatters.

CPY N HLD

RDY

Copy and hold, Carbon Hill sent, and READY came the immediate Firelands Dispatch reply.

The fireman sent the Sheriff’s message, his cadence steady, unhurried.

He knew Firelands already had the initial communication the one given them with the snag-bag, he knew they would have been waiting for his reply, and he also knew that he would want the Sheriff’s go-ahead before the final command to send.

Until then, the message would be packaged, ready and waiting in Firelands to be sent by more modern means.

 

Old Pale Eyes, Tickie thought, his stomach shrinking as he held the bottle at arm’s length.

The lawman’s eyes were quiet, solemn as he reached for the bottle.

Tickie flipped the wire bail on his own, knowing he’d better drink fast: he absolutely guzzled the beer, on an empty stomach, knowing it would hit him fast, but not caring: he was hungry, he was thirsty, and he knew he had to dispose of his purloined goods however he might, for the fat, short-tempered barkeep might discover the theft at any moment and come after him again.

The Sheriff drank his as well, drinking like the thirsty man he was: he took two long breaths, tilted up the brown longneck, drank gratefully, handed the empty down to the lad.

“Thank you, son,” he said quietly. “That was good.”

Tickie looked over his shoulder, fearfully, as the greasy, sweating barkeep came storming out of the sorry, dirty, sagging excuse for a saloon.

“I’ll take care of him,” the Sheriff said quietly. “Scoot.”

Tickie didn’t need to be told twice: he ducked under the Sheriff’s horse’s chin, scampered across the street: a glance, the Sheriff was dismounted and striding toward the greasy barkeep, his palm up.

Tickie flipped up the loose board, slid the two bottles quickly under, dropped the board, ran down the alley.

Behind him, the barkeep’s bellow: “I’LL KILL HIM, THE THIEF!”

 

Wilma Kincaid looked across the street, felt something … some energy, perhaps, a residue of some strong feeling …

“I feel it too,” the Sheriff said quietly.

He studied the ground.

“I was about here …”
He remembered the beer, he remembered the boy: he looked, quickly, to his left.

“This way.”

Wilma ran to keep up with the tall man’s long-legged stride.

He went down the alley, looked around, frowned, eyes narrowed.

“Did you feel it?” he asked.

“Feel what?”

“I’ve been here before.”

Wilma laughed nervously. “This is your county, isn’t it?”

Linn shook his head. “I’ve been here a thousand times over the years, but … I … it’s like I’m looking for something.”

He looked across the street at what used to be a saloon.

“The answer’s there.”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

4. REMNANTS

Tickie slid under the Mercantile and listened.

Between the boards, a crack of light; beside it, another: he breathed through his mouth, listening, waiting, hidden under the floor, his belly reminding him it wanted more than a beer to keep it quiet.

Tickie hadn’t eaten in more than a day and he promised himself he would not chew on his shoe tops like he’d seen a starving miner do, the winter before: the miner took sick – pneumonia, likely – and his rat-stripped skeleton sat upright in a mineshaft on a well-built chair, somehow still mostly intact.

Tickie picked the dead man’s hat off the floor of the mine tunnel and reverently put it on the unmoving head, and so it had remained, and Tickie avoided that particular mineshaft until the stench of a rotting body dissipated – not that there was much, it was cold enough it rotted slow, and the rats were ever so happy to have a good meal.

Several good meals.

A shadow passed overhead, something moving, blocking the light from between the boards, but something light, silent …

The cat, he thought, smiling a little.

He liked the big furry calico, it was warm and it didn’t hesitate to pile up in his lap and go to sleep, and sometimes if Tickie had a blanket, the cat would curl up under the blanket with him, and it was good to have a friend, if only for a little while.

Tickie waited until he was satisfied nobody was around before easing a board up, carefully, using only his finger tips: he slid this board to the left, hesitated, listening, then moved the next one over and slid it to the right.

He moved slowly, patiently, not daring to hurry, not daring to risk the slightest sound: upon his stealth depended his meal.

Tickie slid a little to one side to see as far as possible through the narrow opening.

He smiled.

Two cans and two jars found young fingers gripping them, working them carefully to the opening and down into the hole: slowly, stealthily, carefully, he eased one board, then the other back into place, and only just in time.

A creak, a step: he heard a door open, a man’s pace, dust philtered down from between the boards and a heavy tread stepped on the very boards he’d just replaced.

Tickie closed his eyes, shivered a little, then began his careful progress out from under the Mercantile.

There was another mineshaft, one higher up, one without rats and without an old miner to watch with hollow eyes as a hungry boy with a stolen can opener, murdered open a stolen can of meat, twisted open the lid on a stolen jar of home-canned peaches.

The Old Sheriff looked around the back room of the Mercantile, his eyes tightening a little at the corners: he looked at the stack of canned goods and saw the two cans and two jars that had been placed there for the boy, were gone.

He nodded, almost imperceptibly, then turned and went back into the Mercantile.

Money exchanged hands, and the proprietor set two more cans and a loaf of bread, wrapped in a red and white check cloth, where the previous items had been.

 

The Sheriff and the ghost hunting researcher stepped over what used to be a bat wing door, inside what used to be a saloon.

“Ugh, it’s so cramped!” Wilma muttered.

“Low ceiling,” Linn agreed. “Easy to heat.” He looked around, pale eyes reading what was, what used to be. “The stove was likely there – where radiation could do the most good – it looks like the stove pipe likely ran along … there …”

His pointing finger traced the darkened line running halfway around the room and disappearing into a rock chimney.

“They ran the stove pipe as far as they could,” Linn explained, “to get all the heat they could before the hot smoke went up the chimney and was lost.”

“Oh,” Wilma said, surprised. “I … it does make sense.”

Linn turned, looked at broken, fallen shelves.

Bottle pickers had long since stripped any intact glass bottles.

“Careful where you step. There’s broken glass back here.” He took a step, another, chuckled, pointed.

“See that frame?”

Wilma turned, looked at where he was pointing, puzzled at the dirty, crooked wood frame: a sliver of something silver still clung to a corner.

“That used to be the mirror behind the saloon’s bar.”

“I thought saloon mirrors were big,” Wilma protested, her hands pantomiming a truly huge glass panel.

“Only in the movies,” Linn grinned, “or over at the Silver Jewel.”

“Why such a tiny mirror?”

“It’s likely all they could afford.”

 

The barkeep slid a bottle of beer across the rough-sawed planks to the pale eyed lawman.

“He sneaks in here and steals me blind,” the barkeep complained. “I don’t know how many bottles of my best he’s taken –“

He looked up and his voice ground to a halt at the look in the lawman’s glacier eyes.

“Where are his folks?” Old Pale Eyes asked, his voice quiet, just a little less than a growl, but not much less.

“Folks?” the woman brayed. “Folks, now that’s rich! He wasn’t born, he was hatched –“

The lawman’s eyes were hard, unforgiving in the small mirror, and the woman’s voice, like the barkeep’s, stopped abruptly.

“Where does he live?”

“Live?” the woman screeched, her nose wrinkling up as she said it. “He don’t live nowhere!”

“He has no one to take care of him, then,” the lawman said quietly – a statement, not a question.

“Yeah,” the barkeep grunted, then belched, thumping his chest with a closed fist. “Dyspepsia.”

“Dyspepsia,” the Sheriff said unsympathetically, shaking his head. “Dyspepsia.”

He shoved the unopened bottle of beer back across the planks. “I lost my appetite.”

His heels were loud on the warped and sagging boards; barkeep and his woman watched their only customer walk out the door.

 

“Some of these places were rough,” Linn murmured, looking around: “they’d have tables of some kind so a man could play cards, chairs so he could set … sometimes the bar was a couple planks on barrels or maybe saw horses, anything they could set ‘em on. Behind …”

“Shelves?”

He nodded. “The best would be on top where it could be seen. Top shelf whiskey, brandy, whatever was alcoholic, potent and looked fancy. Cheaper stuff lower down. The best was under the bar where no one could see it, unless it was just planks on a couple barrels.”

“What are these for?”

“Hm?” Linn turned and saw she was indicating shreds of cloth hanging from the ceiling boards.

“Trash catchers, likely. Looks like they were … “ He pulled a small, powerful light from somewhere, shone it across the belly of the sagging boards, nodded. “Nailed here – someone took the nail, surprised they didn’t burn the place down so they could recover the nails … this ceiling was nailed up, likely when the town was new and there was money to be spent. I’d say they hung whatever cloth they had to catch dirt.” He frowned, stepped back, looked at a hole that might have been made by a man’s leg punching through it from above. “Unless it was to catch bird nest trash or the like.”

Wilma shivered.

Linn turned, curious.

“That feeling again,” he muttered.

“You’re sensitive to something,” Wilma observed. “I think you’re … more sensitive because you’re upset over your daughter.”

Linn’s eyes snapped to the side, cold gimlets that impaled her as absolutely as if she’d been driven to the wall with a whaler’s harpoon: he looked away, just as quickly. “I’m sorry.”

“Tell me about your daughter.”

Linn’s head turned, his eyes following something.

“Outside,” he whispered. “I went outside.”

 

Pale eyes surveyed the empty street.

There was precious little mining still done.

One or two miners at most, digging out brown coal by hand, barely making a living: brown coal was a cold coal, not much heat in it; some folks said if you dried it in the sun, over summer and then over winter and into summer again, it would put out more heat, but this was more of an experiment, and coal was hard to dig: once a man dug it out, nobody wanted to wait the most of a year before donating it to a nice friendly heat stove.

The Mercantile was still here, more out of habit than much else: there were maybe a half dozen families, a half dozen ranches on this end of the county, and this mercantile was closer than Firelands.

The owner was a dried up fellow who’d come out from New England somewhere, likely running from something he’d done, or imagined he’d done; he was content to stay here until he got so skinny and dried up that he blew away like the dust that philtered in through between the clap boards nailed on the outside of the building.

Law and Order Harry Macfarland was still here, God knows why; the town didn’t even have a mayor anymore, the man wasn’t being paid … habit, likely, he hadn’t anywhere else to go, it was home to him, him and his memories. His wife was buried in the churchyard and he’d taken her death pretty hard.

Old Pale Eyes frowned and considered for a moment.

He’d talked with the boy, he knew the lad could tell time and he could read some, he could write his own name and quote Scripture.

He looked over to the Mercantile.

For a change, a wagon was in front of the store, and the man had customers: he knew if he’d looked the other way, he’d have seen the barkeep looking with envious eyes at what he considered his rightful income, better spent on beer than on trifles like cloth goods or flour, needles and pins or a good hatchet.

The lawman sauntered casually over to the Mercantile.

When the boards were surreptitiously moved and questing fingers found the supplies had been replaced, he found something else.

He found a watch, a nickel cased watch – nothing fancy, just a plain looking watch, but more wealth than he’d had in his hands at one time, ever! – and a note.

He had one pocket left that didn’t have a hole in it and the watch and its leather strap and fob went into that one good pocket, along with the note: once he got out to good light, once he’d made his way to the mineshaft where he’d scavenged boards enough to block the wind, once he’d struck flint and steel and showered sparks onto a mouse nest and started him a small fire that made no smoke, a fire no bigger than a woman’s china teacup, he read that note.

His eyes squinted a little and his lips moved as he sounded out the regular block print, a man’s strong hand in pencil on good rag paper.

Corral tomorrow, he read, ten o’clock – and beneath, a drawing, a watch face with the short hand pointing to the number 10 and the longer hand pointing up toward the 12, the only two numbers drawn on the watch face.

He unwrapped the loaf of bread and held it against his face, under his nose, breathing deep of the smell of fresh baked sourdough, the smell he remembered dimly came from his Mama.

That night, for the first time in a very long time, he slept with a full belly, and he dreamed of a clean kitchen and fresh baked sourdough bread.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

5. “I GOT YOU!”

The fireman returned to the telegraph office, opened a panel, checked battery status and nodded.

The gel cells were pretty well full, it would be safe to run the lights.

“You warm enough?” the engineer asked.

“If you’re cold, you can get back in the car.”

The engineer raised a fist, waved it. “Yeah, thanks a lot, Jack! You think I’m gonna set out there when we might get a reply?”

“How long do you reckon it’ll take?”

The fireman stared at the mute sounder. “It takes what … twelve minutes to get a signal to Mars … no idea how long it’ll take before they put together a message, if there’s anything to send. If Marnie is critical we might not know anything til she wakes up or dies.”

“Now if you aren’t just a cheerful pot of sand,” the engineer muttered.

“Would you rather I lied to you?” the fireman snapped, just as the sounder began to clatter.

He turned to face the set, gripped the General Electric straight key’s button, tilted his head a little as if listening to something audible to him alone, then with barely visible movements, he tapped the reply, released the broad black button.

The fireman’s mouth was suddenly dry as he snatched up the pencil.

One click for a dot, a double-click for a dash: it wasn’t the CW he used nightly on his ham radio, it wasn’t the short dit-tone for the dot and the longer dah-tone for the dash – it was the obsolete system that few practiced anymore -- but it was what he used three times a week and most weekends, when he wasn’t firing a boiler or running the inspection car.

His eyes unfocused on the upper half of the sheet his pencil was riding as his brain shifted entirely out of the here-and-now and went into almost an altered state.

The engineer’s jaw tightened, as did his chest, as he read the precise print marching in regular lines across the ruled yellow tablet.

CH FN

CH

RDY

Y

Carbon Hill, Firelands, the fireman heard, and tapped back Carbon Hill.

Ready?

Yes.

He took up the pencil, readying himself for what he knew would be an important message.

He knew Marnie – hell, they’d gone to school together! – she’d been a laughing little girl in pigtails, a little girl who beat him at marbles, a little girl who rode to school with her pale-eyed Daddy and both on horseback, a little girl who started (in sixth grate!) on the school’s trap and skeet team by breaking 25 straight her first shoot, putting most of the boys there to shame.

He knew she’d been accepted to the Air Force Academy, he knew she was a pilot, he knew she’d been involved in something that returned her to Firelands, where she wore a deputy’s badge and rode side-by-side with her pale-eyed Daddy.

If Daddy was Sheriff, that is, which he was.

And somehow – somehow! – their Marnie, their cute little Marnie in pigtails and knee socks and saddle shoes, their pale-eyed deputy who picked up a drunk and threw him face first into a horse trough, their Marnie …

Our Marnie! he thought viciously with part of his mind, while the rest translated the clattering brass and transcribed the message.

The engineer’s eyes followed the pencil, willing it to run faster, write faster, tell its story faster, faster, faster …

CH FN CPY

CPY

FN SKSK

 

Carbon Hill, Firelands, copy?

Copy.

Firelands signing off

The fireman’s hands were pressed hard on the desktop as he re-read the message.

He looked up.

“Get the Sheriff,” he said, his voice tight.

The engineer didn’t need to be told twice.

 

The barkeep’s hand closed on the handle of the smooth-hafted Osage orange maul.

He used it for a bung starter.

He also used it to crack heads when necessary.

He saw that thievin’ boy and he saw his chance to put an end to his thievin’.

For a fat man, the barkeep could move quiet.

He followed the boy down the street, toward the corral, moving on the balls of his feet.

The boy had a slip of paper in one hand and something in the other.

The barkeep catfooted up behind the lad, raised the knotted root maul, brought it down hard.

I got you, he thought, lips peeling back from decayed, yellow teeth.

There was a sound like a dropped, ripe melon, then the sound of a pistol shot.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

6. THAT’S ODD

“This way,” Linn whispered. “I came this way.”

He tasted copper and felt his heartbeat run up like a suddenly fueled engine.

He leaned forward into a run – he wasn’t sure where – he stopped, questing left, then right, seeking something, casting back and forth like a hound on the scent –

Wilma Kincaid knew the signs, she’d seen this once before, and she knew this blood relative of a powerful ancestor was feeling, tasting, reading his ancestor’s path by picking up on the emotional residue left behind, like following a stream of fragrance drifting behind a society matron strolling across an hotel’s grand ballroom.

 

Old Pale Eyes did not waste breath with profanity, nor did he stomp, gesture or gesticulate to express his anger.

His anger was as cold and as controlled as his hands.

He punched out the fired round, dropped in a fresh, counted the clicks, eased the hammer nose down on his buryin’ money, eased the engraved Colt back into his left hand holster.

He walked slowly up to the dying man and his young victim.

The boy’s hands clenched at the moment of death, the result of sudden, massive trauma to the brain: the watch was squirted out of his grip, like trying to pinch a fresh watermelon seed between thumb and forefinger: the paper was crushed in his palm.

The Sheriff picked up the watch, slipped it back into his pocket.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, then rose.

He looked around.

The boy had no home, no family, no one to claim him.

The Sheriff looked toward the Mercantile.

I’ll need a shovel, he thought, and a blanket to bury him in.

I wonder if he ever had a blanket of his own.

He looked down at the still figure.

Just a boy, tryin’ to get along as best he could.

“Now you,” he said aloud to the fat, greasy barkeep with the hole through his chest, “you I’m a-gonna let die and then I’ll drag you out and let the buzzards have you.”

The barkeep gasped, gurgled, coughed up blood: his head turned a little to the side and his hand relaxed, releasing the smooth wooden handle of the blood-smeared Osage-orange-root maul.

The Sheriff tasted copper.

He turned, his right-hand Colt whispering from leather with a life of its own: the gun bucked in his hand and part of his mind wondered, Who the hell is firing my pistol?

Twenty feet away, the fat woman collapsed like a sack of sand, the cocked double gun hitting the ground unfired, a hole just to the left of the bridge of her nose allowing her soul to escape the no longer tenable carcass it had been inhabiting.

The tall, pale eyed lawman swore quietly, something cold slithering down his back bone as he realized just how close he’d come to being back shot.

The Sheriff reloaded his right hand Colt, then bent again, carefully worked the paper from the boy’s hand.

“I’ll be right back,” he murmured, then walked slowly across the empty dirt street toward the Mercantile.

He stopped and looked down at the boardwalk.

He reached thumb and forefinger into his pocket, brought out the watch.

He wrapped the paper around it, lifted the loose board, and set the watch down on top of the empty beer bottles, then lowered the board again.

Old Pale Eyes straightened, looked at the proprietor.

“I need to buy a blanket,” he said, “and a shovel.”

 

 

Linn knew the corral was very near here, maybe most of a century ago, the posts long since scavenged either for fence posts or firewood: it didn’t matter which, really, they were gone, and all he had was the vague feeling that something wasn’t right –

“I feel it too,” Wilma Kincaid said. “Anger. Deep and … something vicious, and surprise.” She looked at the Sheriff, clearly puzzled. “It feels complicated.”

Linn nodded, looking down, eyes busy, searching for something.

They looked at the Mercantile, looked at one another, and with one voice said, “Blanket.”

They headed for the vacant-eyed building, almost at a run.

“Hold,” Linn said, throwing out his arm: Wilma grabbed it to keep from falling over.

Linn bent over and lifted the loose board, looked under it, then looked over at Wilma Kincaid.

She blinked, looked at the Sheriff.

He picked up a paper wrapped watch, held it with the cracked leather strap and the railroad fob dangling, frowning at the absolutely dust-free artifact.

He rubbed his thumb meditatively over the fob, rubbing away a little of the dark staining, bringing a cluster of roses out in bright, copper-colored relief, and under it, the letters Z&W RR.

His jaw eased out just a little. “That wasn’t there yesterday,” he said quietly.

“SHERIFF!”

The fireman’s excited voice echoed off warped, dying buildings. “SHERIFF!”

“YEO-OHHH!”

The Sheriff rose easily, turing a little, his reply a descending two-note, surprisingly musical for all its power.

“SHERIFF, SHE’S ALIVE! SHE WASN’T HURT! SHE SAID STORY AT ELEVEN!”

Wilma Kincaid’s eyebrows quirked a little, puzzled, as she regarded the grinning fireman in his hickory stripe hat and bib overalls and a grin as broad as any two townships in Texas.

“Story at eleven? – ooph!”

Wilma Kincaid grunted painfully as the Sheriff turned and seized her in an absolutely crushing bear hug: in that moment she discovered, with absolutely no doubt, that a quiet man is a strong man, for it felt like most of her ribs were being sprung as he hauled her off the ground and whirled her around, laughing, and his laughter filled the clear mountain sky above them.

The cracked, dried leather watch strap swung out from the Sheriff’s fist, the tarnished brass railroad fob swinging happily in the chill Colorado sunshine.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

7. I TRIED TO WARN YOU

It still felt a little odd, she considered, to have a perfect gentleman for a companion, one who opens doors for her, draws out a chair for her, addressed her with respect, and yet a strong enough man to bear hug her and haul her easily off the ground as he gives vent to some overwhelming joy.

The Sheriff opened the heavy door of the Silver Jewel, stood aside for her.

He laid the watch on the hotel counter, laid the paper beside it, nodded.

“The trick of the wise man,” the Sheriff explained, “is not to have the answers, but to know where to find them.”

He thrust his chin at the watch, unfolded the paper, flattened it out.

“I recognize my Quad-Great Granddad’s print. He would block print like this when he was addressing someone less literate, so we know something about the intended recipient. I’ll go through his Journals.”

He frowned thoughtfully, considering.

I remember reading something about a watch and a corral but it’s been years since I was into that chapter and verse.” He looked at the young woman behind the counter. “Violette, could you hold onto these for me, please?”

Violet Starr smiled, her cheeks pinking a little, and said something too soft to catch.

The Sheriff turned, indicated a far door; he and the ghost hunting tourist crossed the restaurant floor, stopped at the closed door.

A pierced, hand written index card read, “Ladies’ Tea Society in Session.”

Linn looked at the card, swallowed hard: it was his Mama’s handwriting, and he remembered the night she dipped a quill in rich red ink and laid the elegant calligraphy between the barely-drawn pencil lines.

He thrust out his hand. “Miss Kincaid, I genuinely regret that I must tend a more domestic detail. My segundo is handling the office while we finish moving into Mama’s house. I know I talked about her like she’d died yesterday, but it’s been a little over a year now and I didn’t want to move in until everything was probated.”

Wilma Kincaid took his hand and was not surprised when he raised her knuckles to his lips again.

“Are you sure you want to sit in on the Ladies’ Tea Society?” His eyes held a hidden mirth and something warned Wilma that all was not as it seemed – a feeling she shoved quickly aside.

“I’ll be fine,” she smiled. “I’ve had a bath, a change of clothes, what could be better?”

Sheriff Linn Keller eyed the ghost hunting tourist in the stylish pantsuit with … what?

Are you trying not to laugh? she wondered, then reconsidered, as the Sheriff’s expression was almost … sheepish.

“I just … I don’t want you feeling out of place.”

She tilted her head a little to the side, laughed quietly. “Out of place? Hardly, Sheriff!”

He touched his hat brim and drew open the door.

Wilma Kincaid whispered “Thank you” and stepped across the threshold.

She stopped, her stomach dropping about twenty feet, and suddenly she felt out of place ...

very out of place...

The Ladies’ Tea Society – every one of the ladies, even the girls, even the little girls – were all in period-correct gowns – hair styles – gloves –

She turned and caught a glimpse, as the door swung quietly shut, of that pale eyed Sheriff’s quiet smile and a gentlemanly, “I tried to warn you,” and in that moment, had the door not stood between them, she could have cheerfully kicked the man right in the shins.

Wilma turned, her mouth suddenly dry.

“Do come in,” the woman at the head table called. “I’m Crystal Keller. You must be the ghost hunter. You simply must tell us all about what you’ve found!”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

8. A CRYSTAL OF GREAT VALUE

Crystal Keller was a matron of society, President of the Ladies’ Tea Society, Worthy Matron in their Eastern Star chapter; wife, mother, seamstress, librarian, she was also active with their Fire Department auxiliary, the Sheriff’s Department Ladies’ Auxiliary – not a group of commissioned, unpaid deputies, but rather the wives, daughters, granddaughters, nieces and other ladies who supported, aided, abetted and otherwise lent their societal and culinary support to the county’s badge packers – Crystal Keller was a nurse, a re-enactor, and a fiercely proud spouse.

She was also taking a badly needed break from the many labors of helping her sister-in-law Connie, for Connie and her husband Linn were moving into their new house: neither woman felt the least bit guilty about setting aside their labors and getting dressed for their Society meeting.

Crystal's husband, Past Sheriff Will Keller, was retired now, and delighted to be so: he was more than happy to recommend and endorse his nephew Linn when election time came, and though Linn didn’t win the election by a landslide, he won it by a most decisive margin, and from the front page picture it’s hard to tell who was the more delighted: the outgoing Sheriff, the new Sheriff-Elect, the one wife, or the other wife: someone cracked later that the front-page picture looked like Keller University, with so many family gathered around them as the newly elected lawman "raised my right hand and got swore at," as he joked to the reporter.

Crystal had a framed photograph in her living room, beside her graduation portrait from nursing school: the graduation portrait was the traditional, head-and-shoulders shot, nursing cap and white uniform dress and her graduation pin prominent on her collar.

The picture beside it had Crystal, in her nursing dress and cap, holding what was obviously a scared child on her left hip, her encircling arm holding the child secure: in her extended right hand she held a cocked revolver, and the look on her face was that of a fiercely protective mother ready to rip the throat out of someone or some thing that presented a danger to the child.

It wasn’t as good a shot as the formal, professional portrait; it was a little grainy, as it was taken from a newspaper's front-page picture, but it was plenty clear enough to show that this Angel of Healing was more than willing to wield a fiery sword to protect the innocent.

Linn had a copy of that same print, but half size.

He had it framed in his study at home.

It occupied half the frame.

The other half of the frame had a very similar photograph.

It too was taken from a newspaper's front page.

It too showed a nurse, another Angel of Healing, in a white uniform dress and white stockings, with a properly winged white nurse’s cap.

This nurse, too, held an infant on her left hip, her arm locked around the child’s middle, holding it securely to her: like the other photograph, her arm was extended, and in her hand, a cocked revolver.

The picture on the left was Connie, his wife.

The picture on the right was Willamina, his pale-eyed mother.

Each woman was saving a child from being taken, and each woman inarguably saved the child’s life: when Connie faced the would-be abductor with a handful of frontier justice, the responding constabulary was fast enough to come in and lay ungentle hands on the criminal: in his mother’s case, she was obliged to send the wrongdoer to hell on a 38-caliber freight train.

Both women were applauded in public and fired in private; both women offered the same response to the administration that didn’t want their employees acting in such a shocking manner, even off duty: Connie’s response was almost word for word the same as the pale-eyed woman who later became Sheriff, and it involved a polite invitation to the employer to place their lips affectionately on the affected nurse’s backside.

As far as anyone knew, the respective employers declined the honor.

Wilma, of course, knew nothing about this.

She was too busy studying a painting, masterfully executed and beautifully framed in black walnut, and hung on the north wall of the meeting room.

Crystal explained that this had been commissioned by the Old Sheriff himself.

Traveling artists, she continued, would capture interesting (or profitable) images in the American West and carefully pack them for shipment back East, or to Europe, or perhaps one of the newly prosperous areas there in the West.

This was an exception.

Portraits were not cheap; portraits, as a matter of fact, could be rather expensive, which is why there are more fine, lifelike portraits of European nobility than of American workmen of the same era: the Europeans could afford such luxury.

This, as previously stated, was very much an exception.

The artist’s name was known; this was not the artist’s usual style, Crystal added, for the artist was renowned for very high quality portraiture.

This was of a woman on horseback.

The artist knew horses, it was obvious – the horse looked ready to sail out of the portrait and across the room.

The woman, as well, looked quite ready for war.

It was a woman of the 1880s, in a proper riding-dress, a woman with red hair, a woman with a shotgun across the saddle in front of her, a woman standing up in the stirrups and leaning over the mare’s neck, her expression clearly one of fury and of purpose and of focused, barely contained, rage!

The mare’s ears were laid back and her nose was thrust into the wind, all four hooves were off the ground, the woman’s red hair was escaping its capture and was twisting in the wind behind her, as was the mare’s tail, and so skilled was the artist's work that to the eye, hair and mane and horse's tail flowed as if alive.

Crystal explained that a comparison had recently been made between this portrait and an actual glass-plate photograph of the Old Sheriff’s wife Esther, standing with her favorite paint mare Edi, and the artist’s depiction of this horse was almost photographic in its faithful depiction of the horse’s markings.

Wilma studied the painting, fascinated; she blinked, looked at Crystal.

“This tells a story,” she said slowly.

“Yes, it does,” Crystal smiled. “Connie?”

Connie Keller stood, eyes demurely downcast: she carefully sidled to the aisle, paced delicately to the front of the room, turned.

“Connie is the Sheriff’s wife,” Crystal introduced: Connie’s smile was quick, genuine, her hand cool and her palm a little coarse, but her grip surprisingly firm.

“I should have worn gloves,” Connie admitted. “I’ve been throwing hay bales again.”

“Overachiever,” Crystal muttered, her smile taking the sting out of the comment: they were more than friends, and more times than one each had worried on the other’s shoulder, when their husbands were in harm’s way.

“This is Esther Keller,” Connie nodded to the painting. “She is astride her favorite paint mare Edi. In this moment she is riding to the Sheriff’s office and she is more than willing to begin what the Old Sheriff called ‘a young war.’ You see” – her smile was quiet, knowing – “Esther was in competition for the Old Sheriff. Another woman was sizing him up as husband material and she was not going to let that happen.

“She and a few other ladies were preparing a good supper for the Old Sheriff and his good friend Marshal Charlie Macneil.”

“More like his brother,” Crystal offered, and Connie nodded.

“Linn said they were living proof not all brothers are born of the same womb,” Connie agreed, and Wilma’s eyebrows quirked a little, curious.

“She doesn’t know about Linn,” Crystal whispered.

“Oh.” Connie blushed a little. “My husband’s name is Linn. He was named for his four-times-great-grandfather Linn, who was second Sheriff of Firelands County. It’s the Old Sheriff she was riding to – not my husband!” – she laughed a little – “the only times I’ve had to make a flying trip was when they hauled him into the hospital, and I certainly didn’t look this good!”

“That’s beautifully done,” Wilma admitted, blinking. “I don’t understand … I’m missing something. Why was she riding like this?”

“Her intended had been shot.”

“What?”

Connie nodded, suddenly solemn, and something told the Eastern woman that Connie Keller had more than a passing knowledge of what that must be like.

“It was right across the street, in front of the Sheriff’s office.”

Wilma paled a little, gripped the pretty young wife’s forearm. “Show me,” she whispered, her throat tight. “Show me!”

 

Linn’s chest ached.

Not for the first time, either, and likely not the last.

He tethered his big Sam-horse in front of the Sheriff’s office, just a quick single turn of the reins: his big plow horse looked slow, looked ungainly, but this long legged warm blood covered ground at a good rate, and his faithful old Sam-horse suited the new Sheriff.

His big Sam-horse was also the last link he had with the Life that Was, back East; he patted the gelding’s neck, took a pained breath.

Damn that cannon, he thought, remembering the wartime detonation that caved in the low ribs on his right side: when the weather changed, his chest ached, and it ached now.

He took another breath, raised his head, turned to look at the heavy timber door of the Sheriff’s office.

Jacob was grinning at him from the open doorway.

Linn’s face started to stretch a little the way it did before he allowed himself the luxury of a smile.

Something punched into his low ribs, something deep and hard and suddenly he was sick clear through and his Sam-horse grunted and Linn stared at the red spot in Sam’s chest, a spot that started to weep blood, and both his legs and his horse's legs started to bend without either of their let-be.

I’ve been shot, he thought, surprised, and the sound of a rifle shot kind of sank through his surprise.

Part of him knew if he’d been shot he’d best move and part of his mind was bristling with red-bearded RAGE and he heard an Irish sergeant bellowing RETURN FIRE and the world turned slowly around him and his legs crossed under him as he corkscrewed a little and the earth reached up and smacked him from belt to the back of his head and he was laying on the ground and he couldn’t move he was so weak his arms wouldn’t work --

Something grabbed the back of his shirt collar and pulled and he heard screaming and the sound of gunfire and he looked up and wondered Why is Jacob screaming and why is he firing that Army colt and why can’t I move and it’s hard to breathe –

 

“He was shot in the back by someone who didn’t want a Sheriff in town at all.

“Word travels fast, and a runner took this terrible word to the little house on the edge of town where the ladies were preparing a fine meal for the invited guests.

“Esther turned pale when she heard that the pale-eyed Sheriff had just been shot, and she declared stoutly ‘Oh no the won’t!’ – she set the Land Speed Record for changing out of her fine gown and into her riding outfit – and she was riding for town just as hard as her Edi could run.” Connie nodded to the painting.

“Marshal Macneil stepped out the Sheriff’s Office doorway with a buffalo rifle and settled the argument with one shot, then he grabbed the injured Sheriff and hauled him inside with one mighty heave.” She smiled thinly. “When the body was examined – the assassin, not the Sheriff – he had five of Jacob’s six pistol balls in him, and of course a big hole from that buffalo rifle.”

“I suppose you’ll want to check for vibrations or EVPs or something,” Crystal suggested.

“I … I don’t have any equipment with me,” Wilma admitted, “but yes, I’d like to …”
Her voice trailed off, her imagination feeding off the painting and from the word portrait the two women just painted.

“Where was he shot?” she asked, her voice suddenly brisk, businesslike.

Crystal picked up a small, delicate gavel, rapped it once against a round, turned-maple sounding block.

“Recess!” she declared happily. “We’re going ghost hunting!”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

9. COLLAPSE

The original Sheriff’s Office was plenty big for its time.

More a fortress than an office, it was laid of peeled logs, thick timbers interlocked at the corners and pegged where needed, built stout and with intent to hold against hostile attack, and proof against anything but a young howitzer.

It was set hard up against the board walk, and the board walk separated it from the wide dirt street; a roof ran the length of its front, overhanging the boardwalk, sheltering it when necessary from rain, more often from snow or blistering sun, for the sun is quite strong at the high altitudes; the door was heavy and hung on stout, thick, heavy, hand forged hinges: for all its ponderous mass, it was well built, and opened easily.

It stood for many years, until after the turn of the century, until after another damned war, until after that pale eyed lawman’s death, when in a night of storm and tornado, it burned: some said it was arson, some said an explosion preceded the fire.

Its rebuild was planned before its destruction; the new Sheriff’s Office was built of stone, native ashlars cleverly shaped from the bones of the mountains themselves, each proudly bearing the individual Mark of the operative Mason that cut, shaped and finished the stones in the mountainside quarry: these were freighted down the mountain and into town thanks to muscle and blood and good honest horsepower, and the sledges and wagons that crossed the railroad tracks on the heavy timber platform built for their sole purpose ironically intersected sweating, oat-burning horse power with coal-fired, steam-powered horsepower of the Z&W Railroad.

The new Sheriff’s Office was built deeper, a little broader but not much; it remained bounded on either side by an alley, its dimensions were generous, it was but one story tall, and it had a circumferential false front, so riflemen could be stationed on its roof if need be and have shelter from hostile gunfire.

The ladies of the Tea Society flowed in a colorful, chattering stream from the Silver Jewel, a fluid spread of color and fashion of a much earlier era; these properly attired ladies would have been perfectly at home in Firelands of the 1880s and early 1890s, so flawlessly had each selected her garb: their gowns were not only faithfully made from the patterns of the famous House of McKenna Dress Works exemplars, they’d gone so far as to use the correct type material, the correct thread count; relentless pursuit of ancient stashes of buttons, browsing of yard sales and antique stores yielded the period-correct buttons – most went so far as to duplicate this even to their “foundations and smallclothes,” as they termed their multiple underlayers.

Traffic was but light this day, and none had to brake for the sight of the past as it swarmed across the street, pointing and talking to the solitary black crow in a flock of brightly-colored birds, explaining the Mercantile was here, and extended for this width; here (with the appropriate swing of a gloved hand) was the photographer’s studio, overhead was more storage for the Mercantile, and there, immediately adjacent to the Sheriff’s Office, was the mortuary, operated by a fellow universally and somewhat uncharitably known as Digger.

Cindy looked up and puzzled a little at the accumulation of flowing skirts and decorative hats in front of their double glass doors: they seemed to be discussing something with a vigor and enthusiasm the dispatcher was used to seeing among the deputies, when they were expounding powerfully on the merits of one or another sports team, or the merits of one car engine or another.

Wilma Kincaid stood on the poured-cement sidewalk in front of the double glass doors and frowned a little, her eyelids lowering to half-mast, and she felt something that was … something out of place, an energy? – or was it her imagination?

She turned as an arm raised and a gloved hand pointed up the street, and in her imagination she saw a skulking figure with a rifle: the words spoken her by the Society matron, guided the imagined figure’s movements.

Wilma saw the assassin raise the octagon barreled weapon, she saw sunlight reflect off a long facet, she saw blue smoke squirt and roll and spread into the thin mountain air –

Crystal grabbed the Eastern woman’s arm, eased her down to the sidewalk as the woman collapsed, shivering.

 

Down the street, in a narrow, tall, brick building, a low, rectangular, chrome-faced box squealed, the red light on its face flaring into alarmed life: the squeal was followed by a loud, harsh, echoing buzzer that rattled the inside of the brick-lined equipment bay.

Crystal’s amplified voice carried from speakers in every room in the Firelands Fire Department and Emergency Squad.

“Firelands Squad One, woman down, in front of the Sheriff’s office, time of call ten-forty-five.”

Uniformed medics and firefighters alike galvanized into sudden life, the Captain striding toward the equipment bay bellowing, “ALL HANDS ON DECK! TURN TO, DAMN YOU, OR I’LL HAVE YOUR GUTS FOR GARTERS! NO IRISH NEED APPLY! RUN, LADIES, RUN!!” – the bay door hummed and clattered and rolled up out of the way, running feet crossed the stone, hand-laid floor, coats and boots and helmets and warriors shrugged quickly into their armor and mounted their metallic war-steeds, driver’s hands reached down beside the seat and turned explosion-proof battery switches two clicks, two fingers spread in a wide V and pressed two starter-buttons on the dash: Diesel engines snarled into quiet, powerfully-idling life, fingers danced across rocker switches, and big and shining beasts opened their eyes and these metallic monsters began to roll, singing loudly in the cold mountain air.

Crystal heard the Federal siren bolted on the front bumper of their lead engine wind up in its rising scream at the same moment the Captains’ hand tightened on the grey General Electric microphone and his deep confident voice rolled smoothly out of her speaker on top of the radio box: “Firelands Squad One and Engine One enroute.”

 

Esther Keller rode with the shotgun in both hands.

Edi slowed fast, skidded a little, dropping her hind quarters as she did: Esther was out of the saddle and running before the paint mare was stopped.

She saw blood on the ground and wet, fresh blood marking where a body had been dragged into the Sheriff’s office.

The door swung open as she ran toward it.

Esther’s shoulder hit the door hard and she shoved her shotgun into Macneil’s surprised hands and she went down on her knees beside the gasping man on the floor.

She knelt on the man’s left, a boy knelt on his right, a wadded, blood soaked kerchief pressed desperately against the wound.

Esther’s mouth was suddenly dry and she looked into a pale set of frightened eyes.

“He won’t stop bleeding,” the pale-eyed boy said, his voice raspy as if through a tight throat.

Esther’s jaw thrust forward, hardened; a memory floated to the surface in the back of her mind, and she knew what she had to do.

She looked down at the gasping, barely breathing man.

Esther Wales knew this was the man for her – knew this was her man! – she knew this as a certainty the moment she saw him, and she would be damned! if she was going to let this man die!

His vest was already open, as was his shirt: she gripped the boy’s wrist, lifted it and the soaked rag off the wound: viciously, she seized the shirt, hauled it wide open, saw the flow of fresh, bright-red blood, the ragged, torn hole, bone fragments: Esther swallowed hard, then looked up at the boy.

“Is there a physician in town?” she asked, her voice low, almost musical.

The boy looked up at the Territorial Marshal, who nodded.

“Yes, ma’am,” the boy said nervously. “He just got here. Doc Greenlees.”

“Get him,” she almost whispered, then took a deep breath, laid her hand directly on the bloody wound.

“And I saw Linn Keller lying in Linn Keller’s blood and I said unto Linn Keller, Live,” Esther whispered, her eyes closed, and the boy – Jacob his name – shivered to hear it, for he could feel something, something otherwordly moving through her, a focus, a flash, a surge – whatever it was, it gathered powerfully, like lightning in a storm-cloud, and Jacob felt it drive through the red-headed woman’s arm and through her hand and into this man who’d shown him a father’s kindness.

Jacob was already down on one knee.

Had he not been, he would have collapsed.

At the woman’s quiet, powerful words, he saw the injured lawman’s pale eyes snap wide open, and he gasped, and the woman lifted her bloodied hand from his side, seized him by his laid -open shirt and jerked him a little and thrust her face down close to his and screamed, “DAMN YOU, LINN KELLER, YOU ARE NOT GOING TO DIE, DO YOU HEAR ME?” – and Jacob fell back and landed on his backside as he heard the faint, “Yes, ma’am” from the man he was certain was going to die, right there on the floor of his own Sheriff’s office.

Some years later, in an unguarded moment, the Sheriff admitted to Jacob that he’d been lying on his back on the ceiling, looking down at that long tall carcass all bloodied on the floor, and he watched with honest surprise as the woman Jacob came to call Mother, invoked the ancient formula for stopping blood with the

Word, then he said “I kind of fell back into my body and all of a sudden I hurt again and I knew I was going to live.”

 

Wilma Kincaid opened her eyes to see a bright light – a light circumscribed by a chromed ring, a light that extended from the emergency suite’s wall on an articulated, grey-steel arm.

“Oww,” she gasped, and a warm, reassuring hand rested on her shoulder.

“Lay still now,” a man’s voice said. “You’ve collapsed a lung.”

Wilma blinked, getting her bearings.

“Let’s start at the beginning,” the man’s voice said again, and she blinked, looked to her right at the man in the white coat and necktie.

“You’re in the emergency room. We had to tap your chest to get your lung reinflated.”

“Ow,” Wilma grimaced. “I think I already said that.”

A nurse stepped through the patterned curtain. “Excuse me, Doctor Greenlees. A message from your son.”

Dr. John Greenlees nodded, the nurse approached, clipboard in hand.

“Excuse me,” the doctor nodded as the nurse stepped up, squeezed Wilma’s hand.

 

Doctor John Greenlees frowned as he examined the Sheriff’s ragged wound.

“I can’t see a thing here,” he muttered. “I’d like to get him to my office.”

Macneil raised his chin to Jacob: the two moved as if they’d worked together before, though neither had even seen the other before one week earlier: they laid out a wool, Army issue blanket and two poles, laid the blanket over from one side, then the other: they picked up the injured lawman as gently as they could, laid him on the improvised litter.

Macneil hesitated. “Doctor, where’s your office?”

Dr. Greenlees straightened. “I’m upstairs in the Silver Jewel.”

Macneil squatted, gripped the poles at the Sheriff’s head, Jacob swinging around to the foot end: “On three,” the Marshal said quietly as Jacob squatted, gripped the smooth wood poles, nodded. “One, two, three.”

 

The Ladies’ Tea Society waited impatiently with an equally impatient family, which proved fortuitous for both groups.

The ladies of the Society needed a focus for their anxiety, and the family needed relief from the stress of not hearing any news.

The ladies divided themselves naturally, each of them with a member of the family and shortly the waiting room was filled with conversation and laughter, at least until an individual in scrubs came into the waiting room and called, “Vandyke family?”

The family stood, every one of them suddenly focused on the slender nurse in paper shoe covers and a matching sterile haircover.

“It’s a boy.”

The ladies of the Society smiled as the family squeaked, yelped, grinned, laughed or sank back into their chair: the ladies dispensed quick hugs as the particulars were duly recited: length, weight, ten fingers, ten toes, yes he has hair, yes he looks like his father, mother is doing fine, no the father did not pass out.

Another nurse came in, smiled at the familiar exchange: as the family filed back to take a look at the new arrival, the ladies of the Society rose and gathered in a semi-circle around the new arrival.

“Miss Kincaid will be staying the night,” she said, “her lung collapsed and it’s been re-inflated, but we’d like to keep an eye on her for a little.”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

10.  WHAT DID YOU DO TO THAT POOR WOMAN?

 

Linn looked tiredly across the supper table at his equally tired-looking wife, then he looked over at their son.

Jacob was asleep in his mashed potatoes.

He looked back at his wife and smiled a little.

“Somewhere in the archives,” he said quietly, “Mama has a picture of me doing just that.”

Connie laughed almost inaudibly, trying to imagine her long tall husband as a little boy, sound asleep at the supper table, his head turned to the side and laid over in his mashed taters.

“You’ve had a hard day,” Linn said quietly, scooting his chair back. “I’ll take care of Jacob.”

After the table was cleared, after dishes and firstborn were both washed and put away – dishes in the cupboard, a tired little boy in his own bed – the Sheriff and his wife sat down in the living room, side by side on the couch, holding hands and letting the day’s tensions and difficulties flow off them and out of their souls.

“I wonder where that blackmail picture is,” Linn almost whispered as he tilted his head back.

“It’s probably in one of her albums,” Connie suggested.

“Yeah.”  He leaned a little more against his wife’s shoulder, tilted his head over until his ear rested on top of her head.  “We had a strange day today.”

“I heard,” Connie murmured.  “What did you do to that poor woman?”

“I turned the Ladies’ Tea Society loose on her.”

Connie groaned.  “And all I did was put clothes away!”

“Is your gown finished?”

“Oh, yes.  It’s even tailored so I can wear my corset under it.”

She felt his ear turning a little on top of her head, and knew he was nodding.

She knew he was really, really tired.

Normally he would have said something about her looking really good in that corset.

Husband and wife relaxed a little more.

Connie’s breathing was a little slower, a little deeper.

She’s asleep, Linn thought.

“I have to re-read the Journals,” Linn murmured, and Connie jumped a little.

“I thought you were asleep.”

“Not yet.”

Neither one moved.

Husband and wife breathed together, relaxed together, both intending to stand up and go to bed, and neither quite making it happen.

Somewhere in the late hours, Linn woke and stood:  Connie felt him pick her up, and she cuddled into his chest as he packed her up the stairs.

She’d wanted this moment for a very long time – she looked forward to her husband bearing her up the stairs and into their bedroom – but she was so tired, so near deep sleep that she could not move – Connie was content to let her husband bear her up the stairs, and tuck her into their bed, as if she were a little girl and he was her big strong Daddy.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

11. SUSAN

 

“I don’t believe this happened,” Wilma muttered.

“How’s that?”  the nurse asked, twitching the sheet up around the drowsy patient’s neck.

“She was telling me about the Sheriff.”  Wilma was fighting to stay awake, trying to put her thoughts in some order, to make some sense of what happened.

“Old Pale Eyes?”  the nurse smiled, working the pillow a little further under Wilma’s head.

“Mm-hmm.  That’s what she called him.”

“I remember hearing about it,” the nurse said soothingly.  “What happened when you heard it?”

“It was like I was there,” Wilma slurred.  “Then … my side hurt … and I kind of collapsed.”

She managed to winch her eyelids up a little, smiled at the patiently smiling angel of mercy.

She remembered how warm and comforting the woman’s hand was, squeezing her hand just a little, as she submerged in the still lake of slumber.

“What’s your name?”  she said with the last of her strength.

The nurse tilted her head a little and said softly, “Nurse Susan.”

Just before she surrendered to a narcotic assisted snooze, Wilma thought it so charming that a nurse would wear the nursing attire of the 1880s.

They really take this touristy thing seriously, she thought, just before the lights went out.

 

Dr. John Greenlees cut a fine figure.

He was always fastidious about his appearance:  he preferred crisply-starched, pleated-front shirts, a silver-and-black brocaded vest with red-silk lining, his coat was only slightly tailored – but it fit him to perfection, thanks to the good offices of the House of McKenna Dress Works and the more than expert ladies that worked their magic with cloth and with thread.

At the moment his coat was hung over the back of a chair, his shirtsleeves rolled up, and he was washing his hands with the meticulous thoroughness with which he did anything, especially anything to do with his chosen profession.

He’d just spent a good hour working on the lean lawman with the pale eyes, that man with the quiet expression and the clenched jaw, unmoving and silent as the physician explored the wound, extracted splinters of shattered rib, and finally doused the entire raw, open gunshot with carbolic, and applied a tight bandage over it to guarantee no air could enter, nor escape.

“You’ll need to hold still, of course,” the physician said offhandedly.  “There are probably pieces of bone I wasn’t able to find.  They’ll work out on their own, they always do.”

“Yeah,” the Sheriff gasped, the first utterance he’d made since coming to wakefulness.

“If you move around, one of those shards could pierce your lung.”

“It’s happened before.”  The man’s voice was quiet, hoarse, the only betrayal – other than the beads of sweat popping out on his forehead – that he was in pain.

Dr. Greenlees dried his hands, hung the damp towel neatly on the dowel mounted for that purpose.  “How did you come about all that scarring, Sheriff?”

“Cannon exploded,” the lawman grated.

“Ah,” Dr. Greenlees nodded.  “That explains the metal fragments I extracted.”

“They usually work out on their own,” the Sheriff added, breathing carefully.

“I would suggest not coughing, sneezing nor exerting yourself, but you probably already know that.”  Dr. Greenlees walked over beside his patient, rested a reassuring hand on his shoulder.  “It’s often the soldiers, I’ve found, that make the least fuss when I stitch them back together.”

Linn grunted tiredly.

“I can give you something to help you rest.”

“No.”  The Sheriff’s voice was almost a hoarse whisper.  “I’ll be fine.”

There was a delicate tap at the door.

Dr. Greenlees saw the blanket twitch and he knew the Sheriff’s good right hand moved as if to grip a holstered sidearm.

The physician looked to the nearby chair with the double gunbelt hung from its back; he stepped over to the chair, picked it up, brought it over against the bed.

“Can you reach that all right?”

“Yeah.  Thanks.”

Dr. Greenlees nodded, paced across the room, his step as measured and deliberate as his hands when stitching a wound.

A generously built, matronly woman stepped into the room, a woman wearing pince-nez glasses and a white cap, a white dress with a watched pinned on its bosom.

“Dr. Greenlees?”  she asked, smiling.  “I’m Nurse Susan.  You advertised.”

“Please come in.”

 

Crystal leaned heavily on the counter in front of the nurse’s station.

“I don’t see how it could have happened,” she fretted.  “One moment we were telling her where the buildings were, back when the Old Sheriff was alive, and I told her about … about when the Old Sheriff was shot, and she kind of sagged and it was like she couldn’t breathe or something.”

“So you’re the troublemaker that caused all the excitement,” a familiar voice said from behind her, and a pair of hands squeezed her shoulders gently:  Dr. John Greenlees, somehow immaculate and even dapper in green surgical scrubs, winked at Shelby, the nurse behind the counter.

Crystal turned, a distressed look on her face.  “It’s like it’s my fault.”

“Now how’s that?” the kindly physician asked, his voice deep, reassuring, soothing.

“I was telling that ghost hunter about Old Pale Eyes getting shot, and she went down like she …”
Dr. Greenlees gathered the distressed woman into his arms, held her with his usual gentleness.

“I usually see a spontaneous pneumothorax in young, slender men,” he said, “but it’s not at all unknown when a lowlander comes up into the mountains.  She’s a slender woman and I’d say she was predisposed.  It just happened, Crystal.  It just happened.”  He looked down, smiled.  “Now that we’ve satisfied ourselves that you didn’t cause the problem, how’s Marnie?”

“Oh, Marnie!”  Crystal blurted, her hand going to her mouth.  “Oh my God, I am so very sorry!  We – she sent – I mean –“

Dr. Greenlees laughed.  “I know what you mean,” he said.  “Come into my office.  I have one too.”

A moment later each was reading the other’s printout, the hardcopy of the message sent from their relative on the far-away red planet.

Dr. John Greenlees, third great-grandson of the first Dr. John Greenlees, the first physician who made Firelands home, shared the message from his son, Dr. John Greenlees, the first physician to make the Second Martian District his home.

Crystal, wife of Past Sheriff Will Keller, was married to the fourth-great-grandson of the second Sheriff of Firelands County, Colorado.

Marnie Keller, descended from that same pale eyed lawman, was the second Sheriff of the Second Martian District.

 

The Martian physician wrote of cramped quarters, rationing of everything, how often he wished for the mountains and being able to breathe air that wasn’t recycled, but he also wrote of stars so close he could reach up and gather them by the handful, of mountains stark and sharp, of red plains and gullies carved eons before, gullies still sharp edged where they were slashed into the red planet’s face, and he wrote of how much a comfort he found it to have a familiar face, a familiar voice, of how much it meant to have Marnie there.

Marnie’s communication, like her friend the doctor’s, spoke of the harsh and sharp-edged mountains, slashing the black sky above and threatening to rake the stars out of their sockets:  she wrote that two deputies and their Sheriff were murdered, and an attempt was made to kill her, “but he’s dead and I’m not” – and offered no further details.

She did, however, mention that she and Dr. John, as she called her friend and classmate since childhood, were entering into a conspiracy.

As the second Sheriff, and as the second physician, and as they were both from Firelands, they were capitalizing on the presence of a nearby ancient and extinct volcano to justify their recommendation.

Crystal read the paragraph aloud.

“The Second Martian District,” she wrote, “is such a cold and sterile name.”

Dr. Greenlees raised an eyebrow, and Crystal smiled to see it, for she knew that expression well.

“We’re trying to get a better name for the territory,” Crystal read aloud, and Dr. Greenlees started grinning.

“We’re going to try to get it named Firelands.”

 

Wilma Kincaid slept, finally resting for the first time since she’d come this high in the mountains.

She didn’t even notice the oxygen cannula tickling her nose.

Shelby checked the monitors, noted the pulse, blood pressure, pulse-ox, typed the values into the plastic-covered keyboard dedicated to this individual room: she took a long moment to look at her patient, her professional eye and touch assessing in a way no machines ever could.

Satisfied, she nodded, turned:  she startled for a moment, then relaxed, shaking her head. 

Her partner was strolling down the hall, IV bag in hand, when Shelby came out of the room, smiling a little.

“You look like you’ve seen our ghost,” Tammy smiled.

“Plump, white, really old fashioned dress?”

Shelby nodded, her eyes big, wondering.

“That’s Nurse Susan.  We see her sometimes.”

“I didn’t think she was real,” Shelby whispered.

“Oh, she’s real,” Tammy nodded.  “When we see her in a patient’s room, we know” – she nodded to the ICU bed -- she’ll be all right.”

Tammy hefted the IV bag.  “Let me change this out and I’ll see if the coffee’s done.”

“Oh, I would kill for some coffee!”  Shelby groaned.  “Lead on, Macduff!” 

Wilma, in her ICU bed, was too deeply asleep to hear a voice whisper, “Dr. John, your coffee,” nor to see the smiling figure of a portly woman in a white dress turn and walk through the nearby wall.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

12.  IRASCIBLE

 

A few days later, Sheriff Linn Keller looked up as Cindy tapped her fingernails on the frosted glass of his office door’s window.

Barrents would knock, then come on in; Cindy rattled her fingernails against it – “I don’t want to startle you,” she explained once, “and if you’re busy you can ignore it” – Linn debated on whether to wad up the paper he was working on and bounce it off the window by way of reply, and decided against it.

“Come on in,” he called.

The door opened and Wilma Kincaid came in like a timid little girl.

Linn rose, surprised. 

“I didn’t think you’d be out yet,” he admitted.

“They made me promise I’d behave.”

“That sounds familiar,” Linn muttered.  “You didn’t happen to see Nurse Susan, by any chance?”

Wilma frowned.  “Mmm … no, I … no, I don’t remember a Susan.”

Linn looked almost disappointed.

“Okay, I know that look,” Wilma said, turning her head a little as she folded her arms and started patting her foot.  “Out with it, fella, let’s have it!”

Linn took a long breath.  “Nurse Susan is a resident ghost.”

“Where?”  Wilma blurted eagerly, her eyes widening.

“The hospital.  Usually she manifests to patients.  She’s … I’m told she’s very reassuring.”

“Mmm …”  Wilma hummed again, shaking her head a little.  “No, I don’t …”

She frowned, blinked, looked up.

“Kind of stout …”  She looked down at her bodice.  “Well endowed, chubby face, white …”

“You saw her.”

Wilma leaned back against the wall, disappointed. 

“I think I was almost asleep,” she said softly.  “I wish I’d been more awake.”

“That’s when she’s usually seen.”

Wilma looked around, settled into a chair.

“You’re breathing very carefully,” Linn observed.

Wilma nodded.  “Collapse a lung,” she admitted, “and you’ll breathe carefully too!”

 

“That’s what the Old Sheriff told Mama,” Linn said.

“What?”

Linn blinked, realized he’d just let something slip that he didn’t mean to.

He took a long breath, blew it out, cheeks puffing and lips pursed.

“I wish,” he said softly, “Mama was still alive.  She could tell you plenty.”

“Is there someone else in town I should talk to?”

Linn blinked, then chuckled.

“Yes there is.”  He rose, stretched, reached for his uniform Stetson.  “Matter of fact I’ll take you to him.”

Up until now, Wilma had been received by the best of hospitality, or at least without a lack of it.

When the door opened on a modest and unassuming one story cottage built in a great cleft in the granite mountain, she was met with a scowl and a skeptical glare.

“Howdy, Sheriff,” he said suspiciously, then looked at Wilma.

“You’re that ghost hunter.”

That’s not why I came out here, Wilma thought, and she looked to the Sheriff for help.

“Tell her what you saw, Bill.”

“You know what I saw.  Your Mama was there, rest her soul, and she could see him too.”

“She had the Sight,” Linn agreed, “but I don’t.  I didn’t see it and I’d rather Miss Kincaid heard a first hand account from the first hand.”

Bill scowled at the Sheriff.

“At least you didn’t say she should hear it from the first horse’s behind,” he muttered.  “Come on in.  I reckon the coffee’s still fit.”

Wilma looked around the absolutely Spartan cottage.

There was very little furniture, barely enough; there was no television set, nor a computer, and an old-fashioned dial telephone sat on a crocheted doily in the middle of an out-of-place, round, walnut, antique sidetable – absolutely the only concession, the sole exception, to the absolutely, rigidly functional furniture plan.

“I got milk,” Bill growled.  “I ain’t got none of that powdered stuff and I ain’t got no cream.”

“Milk’s fine,” Linn said mildly. 

“I ain’t offerin’ you,” Bill snapped. “I’m offerin’ her.  She’s younger, smarter an’ better lookin’ than you!”

“Yeah, God loves you too,” Linn said easily, and Wilma could see something in his eyes... he was troubled, but he was being quiet and watchful, kind of like a hunting cat while watching something interesting that could be either a meal or a threat.

“I knowed him since before he wants to admit it,” Bill explained, setting one, then two more, heavy filled mugs on the kitchen table:  he thumped a milk jug down in the center between them. “Pardon my fancy pitcher all to hell.  Now whyna hell’d you drag this poor girl allaway out here just to listen to me gripe?  Ain’t she been through enough already?  You got somethin’ ag’in her?”

Linn milked his coffee, offered the jug to Wilma.

“Yeah,” the Sheriff said bluntly.  “She ain’t lied to me and I am returnin’ the favor.”

“Well good for you,” their host sneered before he took a noisy slurp of coffee, hauled out his chair and dropped into it, frowning.

“Wha’d you say yer name was again?”

“Wilma.”  She swallowed.  “Wilma Kincaid.  Your last name isn’t Chipalinski by any chance?”

Bill frowned, surprised.  “No it ain’t, why?”  he challenged.

“Because Old Man Chipalinski was just as disagreeable an old man as you’re pretending to be, only he was that nasty for real.”

“Sees right through me, don’t she?”  Bill said, his eyes bright as he leaned over his coffee cup, head thrust toward the Sheriff across the table like an old bear might.

“She’s a woman,” Linn shrugged.  “Women are that way.”

“Not all of ‘em!”

“Maybe not all, but most of ‘em I’ve run across.”  Linn took another drink.  “Bill, you come to my Mama and said you’d taken a shot at a man there in the roundhouse.”

Bill frowned, his jaw thrust out, and he nodded.

“You helped haul that car load of dead outlaws out of the mine drift.”

“I did that.”

“You saw the Old Sheriff afterward as well.”

Bill glared at the lawman.  “Where you goin’ with all this?”  He shifted his suspicious expression to his long-haired visitor.  “Where’s that fancy ghost huntin’ stuff you people use?  Them … magnetometers an’ EVP sniffers an’ what-all.”

 

“I didn’t come out to hunt ghosts,” Wilma admitted, setting her coffee down.  “I came out just … I wanted to ride the train.”

“Ain’t they got trains back where you come from?”

Wilma nodded.  “Yes.  I’ve ridden the Hocking Valley Scenic Railway – I rode it before they got rid of their Baldwin, it’s at Steamtown in Pennsylvania now – I’ve ridden the Cuyahoga –“

“You come out here to look for ghosts on a train,” Bill muttered, shaking his head.

Wilma stood.  “Thank you for the coffee,” she said coldly.  “Sheriff, I believe we are done here.”

The Sheriff stood as well, drained his coffee, set the mug down quietly.  “Thank you for the coffee,” he said neutrally.

The Sheriff opened the front door and allowed Wilma to exit first, then he turned, and turned glacier-cold and granite-hard eyes on the retired engineer.

“This woman,” he said quietly, “is my guest.”

He barely raised his voice above a whisper.

Bill almost shivered – he felt the cold crawl of goose bumples up his arm and he could have sworn a cold breeze blew through him – through, not over – and the Sheriff turned and pulled the door shut behind him.

Behind the closed door, Bill had the awful, fall-down-the-mineshaft feeling that he’d just offended what he’d once said was the hardest man in the world to offend, and something told him he’d made a really, really bad mistake.

“We’ll go to the roundhouse,” Linn said as they walked back to his four wheel drive cruiser.  “I’ll show you where he saw the ghost.”

“You don’t have to do that, Sheriff.  Perhaps I’d better just go.”

Linn eased the Suburban down the retired engineer’s driveway and onto the gravel road, accelerated smoothly, easily, until their speed was comfortable for the road’s narrow and less than even surface.

“My chief deputy, Barrents,” Linn said, changing the subject, “goes like hell on these roads.  Says if you run fast it smooths out the ride.”

“Does it work?”

Linn laughed.  “I’m having the front suspension replaced on every vehicle we’ve got.”

“I suppose that answers my question,” Wilma said quietly, wiggling a little in her seat:  if she hadn’t been belted in, she would have tucked her legs under her like a settin’ hen. 

“Why didn’t … why was he so disagreeable?”  Wilma blurted, still stinging from the reception neither she nor the lawman expected.

“I don’t rightly know,” Linn admitted.  “He’s not usually like that.”

The radio squealed, an almost musical tone, followed by Crystal’s confident voice.

“Firelands Squad One, man down –“

She gave the location, and 

Linn nailed the brakes, skidded the Suburban to a nose-dropping stop, their dust boiling up around them.

Wilma blinked, surprised, her hands reflexively slapping the dash in front of her.

“That’s Bill’s place,” Linn said tightly, accelerating rearward, the engine singing a high-speed protest:  he spun the wheel, thrust the back end into a barely-big-enough bulge in the roadbed, cranked the wheel and yanked the shifter.

“Move, damn you,” he snarled, and the big Chevy snarled in reply, four wheels throwing gravel as he mashed his boot down hard on the go pedal.

 

The Sheriff beat the squad there by several minutes.

His entry through the locked front door was far less than delicate:  he'd seized the concrete filled ram they kept in his cruiser for forcible entry – a ram meant to bust through a reinforced door, a cement filled pipe with welded loop handles – he hit the locked door just inside the doorknob, hit it a second time:  the door frame splintered, he kicked the suddenly-freed door open, set the ram down inside the door and took three long strides toward the figure curled up and unmoving on the floor by the antique walnut telephone stand.

Bill’s face was twisted up on one side and his hand was locked around the receiver.

Wilma saw the lawman put two fingers beside the purpling man’s Adam’s apple, heard him swear, watched as Linn pried the receiver from the man’s grip and put it to his ear.  “Crystal?”  he called, and his dispatcher said “Sheriff, thank God, is the squad there yet?”

“They’re comin’, they’re in earshot, I hear ‘em,” he replied, his words staccato, precise.

“I knew it was Bill, I could tell the way he wheezed.  How’d you get there so fast?”

“Never mind, tell the squad CPR in progress.”

Linn almost tossed the receiver in the general direction of the cradle, rolled Bill over on his back and interlocked his fingers, pulling his hand back and placing the heel of his hand the way he’d practiced a thousand, ten thousand times, the way he’d had to do, for real, more times than he really liked.

 

Wilma stood back against the wall, her eyes big, her own face pale, and she offered neither word nor move as the medics swarmed in:  she watched as the paramedics did what they always did, and did it efficiently, with no wasted motion:  she watched as the Sheriff moved with them, as if they’d done this many times before, and she watched as they got the man onto the cot and out the door, and she sank to the floor and pulled her knees up and buried her face in denim and wrapped her arms around her legs and shivered like she used to when she was frightened as a little girl.

She never looked up as the Sheriff came back in the room.

She didn’t move as his measured steps crossed the room and she heard something being opened and kind of a whizzing whine sound and then she jumped as his warm hand closed around the point of her elbow.

“Wilma,” Linn said gently, “I’m sorry to trouble you, but I need your help.”

She looked up, wiped the wet off her cheeks and sniffed.

“Come outside with me.  I need you to hold this plywood while I screw it in place.”

Wilma swallowed and nodded and followed numbly, and she pressed her palms on the plywood sheet as the lean lawman placed long wood screws and drove them in with a battery drill.

“His door won’t shut,” Linn explained, “and it gets cold out, I don’t want his furnace to over work and set the place on fire.  I don’t want his pipes to freeze, and I don’t want anyone to go in and steal anything.”  He looked at the drill.  “This, and his toolbox, are about all he has left worth anything.”

He stared at the drill like he’d never seen it before, then blinked, took a long breath.

“Saddle up.  I reckon he’ll be in ER.”

 

Wilma watched from across the waiting room as the Sheriff spoke with the physician.

When the two men shook hands, she somehow she knew the Sheriff was using a very light grip, a professional recognition of the physician’s status as a surgeon:  she’d heard about that, or maybe read it, a scrap of trivia that floated up out of nowhere –

She shivered, blinking, lowered her head a little. 

She let the Sheriff grip her shoulders, and steer her out of the hospital, and back into the big Suburban with the big yellow star on the door, with the slender, square bar of roof lights and the gunrack behind the headrests.

She never said a word as the Sheriff talked quietly on the radio, tilted his head a little as the reply came from the upturned, rectangular speaker below the dash.

The Sheriff pulled up in front of a solid-built home, shut off the ignition.

“I’m inviting you for supper,” he said.

Wilma nodded.

Connie was at the door, wiping her hands in her apron: she had a little smudge of flour on one cheek, and the house smelled wonderfully of home cooking, and Wilma’s stomach reminded her it had been a while since she’d eaten anything.

Linn reached for his wife, wrapped his arms around her, held her tightly, saying without words that it had been a difficult day.

“I heard on the scanner,” Connie said uncertainly.  “I heard them go out but haven’t heard anything since.”

Wilma saw something in the pale eyed lawman’s face she hadn’t seen before, and it did not set well to see it.

She saw a man haunted by his own memory.

“He didn’t make it,” Linn said, his voice tight.  “Doc said he had a pre-existing aneurysm.  I described his behavior when we went out to see him and Doc said likely that was the aneurysm swelling some more and it finally blew and killed him.”  The Sheriff sighed.  “I should have known, I should have … he’s not usually like that, I should have –“

Connie leaned into her husband, her arms around him.  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.  “I know you liked that old engineer.”

Linn nodded, hugging her back.  “I brought company.  Is there enough for another plate?”

Connie drew back, looked up at her husband, giving him a wise look that told Wilma he’d brought people home before.

“When I heard she’d come to town, I planned on your bringing her out.  We’ve plenty.”  She looked at Wilma.  “I hope you brought your appetite.”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

13.  RESEMBLANCE

 

Wilma smiled at the big-eyed little boy who chewed solemnly on one of his Mama’s sweet rolls and regarded the visitor with frank curiosity.

She did her best to turn invisible; she didn’t have much appetite, to be honest, until she took the first bite of homemade meatloaf, at which point her stomach reminded her it was tired of sandpapering its sides together out of sheer emptiness.

The Sheriff ate absently, but with a good appetite:  he was preoccupied, at least until his wife asked him if he’d heard when the square dance was scheduled, then he blinked and came back to the here-and-now.

“I’m sorry, dear, I was thinking of Marnie,” he admitted.  “She said story at eleven and she hasn’t followed up yet.”

“I know,” Connie said quietly.  “I’m worried too.”

“Marnie,” Wilma blinked.  “Your … daughter?”

The Sheriff nodded, took a bite of buttered, thick-sliced bread, still warm from baking.

“I’m sorry.  I’d forgotten –“

The Sheriff waved the disfigured slice like a conductor’s baton, chewed, swallowed.  “You’ve had a lot to process,” he said, his voice kindly.  “It’s like being the new kid in school, you’re introduced to everyone in the classroom and then the teacher says you’re expected to have those names down perfect in five minutes or less.”

Wilma blinked, nodded.  “Yes,” she agreed, “it’s kind of like that.”  She extended her plate and Connie loaded on more sweet potatoes.

“I love sweet potatoes with nuts like that,” Wilma confessed.  “I’ve never had them with nuts!”

Linn chuckled, patted his flat belly.  “Once old age catches up with me,” he smiled, “I reckon I’ll have quite the bay window.  It’s God’s grace and nothing else that keeps me flat bellied.  Most men would be fat by now!”

“Don’t let him kid you,” Connie countered.  “He runs it off, believe me!”

Connie turned her attention to their young son, making sure he was eating, and not just pushing green beans around on his plate.

“Bill was never like that,” Linn said abruptly.  “Doc said the aneurysm likely is why he had that change of personality.”

Wilma nodded, shivering a little.

“You’re upset at his death.  Don’t be.”  Linn’s smile was a little crooked.  “I told him when I get old, on the day of my retirement I want to walk in on a bank robbery and be shot right between the eyes.”  He jabbed himself just above the bridge of his nose with an illustrative thumb.  “Boom, lights out, stick a fork in me, I’m done.  Dead.  No Alzheimer’s, no cardboard underwear, no nursing home, gone.”

Wilma saw Connie give Linn “One of Those Looks,” which didn’t slow the lawman at all.

“Bill allowed as he felt the same way. He said he dreaded being confined in the minimum security prison of a nursing home.”  Linn snorted.  “The frank conversation of two men admitting their fear of the future.”

“You showed me the pictures of your mother and your great-aunt,” Wilma said, trying to steer the conversation in a less morbid direction.  “They do look remarkably alike.”  She tilted her head, curious.  “Do you know if they were … if their personalities were … similar?”

Linn chuckled.  “I don’t know about Aunt Sarah,” he admitted, “but Mama was a character!”

Wilma leaned forward a little, blinked.

“You see, she’d taken …”

Linn stopped, looked away, cleared his throat.

“Excuse me,” he said, his voice strained, and he rubbed at one eye, blinked a few times.

“She, um,” he started again, then cleared his throat.

“She’d taken her firstborn and gone back East to take a look at the little one horse town where Grampa – her father – was town marshal, and where he’d been killed.”

He harrumphed again.

“Sorry,” he muttered.  “The town … that was Trimble.  Glouster is just north of it, they’re joined at the hip.  The only difference between one and another is a line on a map.  Anyway …”

He smiled a little, leaned back, a softer look to his face, and to Wilma’s surprise, his eyes darkened just a little, just enough to be noticed.

“Mama was in Glouster.

“Now Glouster has the reputation of being a rough little town – it’s an old coal mining town with several more bars than churches – it took hard men to dig Old King Coal and shovel it into mine cars, and their descendants are distilled toughness.  They have to be.  It’s Appalachia, it’s poor, there are damn few jobs and the place has been dying on the vine for the better part of a century.

“A motor sickle gang allowed as they were going to come in and tree the town.

“The townspeople allowed as that was not going to happen.

“Mama didn’t know any of this.

“She’d stopped in a gas station and filled up, she’d gotten her and my brother an iced tea, and here they came.

“They formed a circle right on the town square, in front of the old depot, and they stopped and the biggest, ugliest, meanest looking one of the bunch stepped off his Harley and strode into the middle of the circle and allowed as he would knock the head plumb off the shoulders of any small town cop that dared to show his face!”

Linn’s words were gentle:  the contrast between his soft voice and the picture he painted, sent a shiver down Wilma’s spine.

“Mama stomped up to that circle and shoved her way through the hard-muscled bikers, she stormed right up to that fella, she shoved her belly into his – well, it was more like she shoved her chest into him because Mama wasn’t terribly tall – and everyone in that gathered around circle started to laugh, and so did that big fella.

“Mama allowed as he was an unwashed, uncouth, unmannerly sort who needed to have his backside kicked right up between his shoulder blades, and she was the right one for the job!  She allowed as she would stretch his legs out and wrap ‘em around a telephone pole, she would pull his teeth with a pair of nail clippers and launch them into the Sulfur Creek with a slingshot, she would pound his head so far down between his shoulders he’d have to unzip his pants to sneeze, and the more she carried on, the more imaginative her threats became, the louder she got, the more everyone laughed.

“Right about then the bikers started nudging one another and pointing.

“The rooflines were lined with the locals.

“The locals had shotguns, the locals had rifles, the locals were not looking very welcoming.

“Mama allowed as he could leave peacefully or he could leave otherwise, and she did not much care which.

“Right about then she took a gamble.

 

“She knew if she got a laugh out of him, they’d be less likely to take umbrage – though the sensible thing to do, with the firepower lining the rooftops, would be to leave – she backed up a step and put up her fists.

“Sure enough he followed her lead.

“He planted his palm on top of her head and held her at arm’s length.

“Mama swung and screamed and swung and threatened and swung and yelled and stomped her feet and he held her out at arm's length and laughed.

"The more he laughed the madder she got, the harder she swung, and he just held her out there and finally she drew back and demanded, “Ya had enough?” and he laughed and said “Little lady, if the women here are like you, ain’t no way in hell I’m gonna cross the men!” – and so they formed up and went rip-roarin’ out of town!”

“Oh, my,” Wilma murmured, hiding her smile behind a flat hand.

“Rip-roarin’!” Jacob announced loudly, and Linn laughed.

“What about you, Sheriff?”  Wilma asked, looking at Connie, and then at the lawman.  “Do you resemble Old Pale Eyes?”

Linn laughed, shook his head.

“No,” he admitted, “Old Granddad is considerable better lookin’ than me.”

“Liar,” Connie muttered, and the two women exchanged a look that Linn saw, but realized it was one of those secret communications between women that men seldom, if ever, truly grasp.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

14.  COMMUNICATION

 

 

Old Pale Eyes stood silent, watching the mouthy newcomer.

A man with a belly full of booze is a man that might tend to foolish decisions, and this one was shaping up that-a-way.

Tom Landers was the designated peacekeeper there in the Silver Jewel, but Tom was a decade and more older than Linn, and when Linn looked over and gave the slightest of shakes to his head, Tom was content to lean casually against the wall, slouching comfortably, knowing he could cross the intervening space in two long strides to belt the offender with the shot filled leather slapper if the need arose.

Linn’s eyes were quiet as he watched the man … didn’t say a word, didn’t make a move, just … watched.

When a quiet man stares at another, the man stared at is going to feel it, and this one did.

Linn usually wore a black suit, with his badge pinned under the lapel:  people in town knew him, he didn’t have to trot out the tin to be respected among the natives; word passed quickly across poker tables when the pale eyed lawman walked into the Jewel, his Jewel, and outlaws talk as freely as any other tradesmen, exchanging professional information among others of their kind:  lawmen were discussed, described, their habits, their effectiveness, and among all the lawmen known, Old Pale Eyes was universally known for his unfailing fairness, for his unfailing courtesy, and for his absolute, unwavering sense of justice.

Spoken in that same breath were comments to the effect that, for a big man, he was really fast, he was really silent, and he was really, really someone a man didn’t want to cross.

Obviously this fellow standing at the bar was not the kind to ask for advice.

One, then another of the men at the bar took their beer and drew back, sought a table or a corner:  one leaned casually against either end of the piano, another had his back to their little stage, one foot up behind him and his elbows on the edge of the stage, and it wasn’t until the mouthy drunk turned and realized nobody stood between himself and the well dressed man with pale eyes, did he realize why the back of his neck itched.

 

He frowned, surprised, as the stranger regarded him unflinchingly with quiet, half-lidded, ice-blue orbs:  normally another man would look away, but this tall skinny fellow didn’t.

“What are you lookin’ at?”  he challenged loudly.

The Sheriff neither moved, nor did he make reply.

He knew he was making the man mad, he knew this fellow would not leave peacefully, and he knew this one would put up a fight.

Tom Landers watched with admiration as the Sheriff, without uttering a word, without making a gesture, played the troublemaker like a fish.

“By God now,” the red-faced man shouted, “I’m talkin’ to you!  DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?”

Linn never changed expression, he never shifted his weight; he stood loose, relaxed, weight on the balls of his feet, arms mostly at his sides.

The challenger took two swaggering steps toward the lawman.

Now Linn was tall and Linn was lean at the waist and Lean was able to move fast when the need arose.

His pious imitation of a carved marble statue was left behind him like dust of his passing; the heel of his right hand drove into the loudmouth’s nose, flattening it and snapping his head back hard:  a boot heel hooked around the man’s knee, yanked, while the Sheriff’s arm pushed through the man’s head, or where the head had been, and half a second after inheriting a hard man’s smashing blow to the bloodied beak, his head hit the floor, hard, shattering his vision into a field of bright and sparkling lights, like a woman’s glitter-veil dropped over his face from a height.

Linn reached down, relieved the trouble maker of a hideout pistol and a knife; he placed these on the bar, then reached down again and picked the man up by the shirt front, hauled him out the front door like he was carrying a luggage, took three trotting steps down to the street, his boot heels loud on the dusty boards:  he swung the man up, started him in the horse trough feet first, giving him a push and stepping back to keep from getting a bath himself.

Of the several folks observing this sight, including some who’d spilled quickly out of the Jewel to watch, most were of the opinion that the Sheriff had the watering trough enlarged so a man could lie in it, full-length, for just such occasions as this:  the Sheriff was asked about that very thing, and he smiled a little, but gave no other answer.

 

Whether Old Pale Eyes did or did not commission an extra large horse trough so drunks could be sobered more quickly, remains to this day a matter of speculation:  Willamina searched the old man’s journals for the answer, and found nothing; his sons asked, casually, and received the same quiet smile, and so concluded that the Grand Old Man very likely did have them made in that manner, for that reason.

A century and more later, another pale eyed Sheriff of the same name explained the unusual size of the horse trough to a small group of tourists.

“This one is made of mountain cedar,” he said, “the seams are caulked with oakum, and as long as the cedar wood is kept wet, it will never rot.”  His eyes were half-lidded, gentle, his voice quiet, but still reaching the furthest member of his audience.

Wilma Kincaid raised a troubled hand.  “Sheriff?”  she asked.  “Did you ever … dunk … someone in this?”

Linn laughed easily, nodding.  “Yes, ma’am, I have,” he admitted.  “I found it useful to baptize the sinner on more than one occasion.”

“You were telling us about Old Pale Eyes,” a young man asked, his hand at half-mast: “how he lit into that man in front of the bar.”

Linn nodded, once.

“Did he ever get his butt whipped?”

Linn smiled a little, the corners of his mustache picking up a little with the effort.

“Not once.  If the odds were not with him, he’d either come into the fight with a cheater available, or he’d wait until a better time.”

“What made him so good?”

Linn grinned.  “Efficiency.”

“Efficiency?”  Two other voices echoed the word, puzzled.

Linn nodded.  “He figured the most vulnerable parts of the body and concentrated his attacks there.  The man was fast, incredibly fast – this from one of three surviving letters from a Territorial Marshal, and once from court testimony.  A witness spoke of the man’s phenomenal speed, how one moment he was looking as sleepy as a cat in a sunny window and the next, he was across the room, he had a fellow by the throat.”

Wilma stared at the lean, relaxed lawman with the old fashioned revolvers on his belt, the lawman who drove a cruiser and talked to a microphone on the end of a curly cord and tried to pump life into a dead man's chest, she stared at a pale eyed, gentle voiced man with an easy laugh, and Wilma remembered the portrait of another lawman who looked much like this one, and she wondered ...

Pale Eyes, are you that fast?

And with the thought, another, following like the caboose on the steam train she'd ridden ...

Are you his descendant, or are you his living ghost?

But the thought was irrational and illogical and she pushed it from her.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

15.  ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER QUESTION

 

Connie’s face was flushed with victory and exertion.

“Come on in!” she almost whispered, “Jacob is napping but you’ll never believe what I found!”

Wilma followed the Sheriff’s wife into their tidy, log-and-timber living room:  an old fashioned rifle with a striped wood stock hung over the fire place and something Wilma recognized as a cow’s horn something-or-other hung with a fringed purse over the mantel:  she was surprised that no dead animal heads stared glassy-eyed at her, just a few portraits, most of them very old-fashioned looking.

She stopped, walked over to an oval, framed portrait:  the subjects were stiffly, formally posed, wearing the garb of the mid-1800s:  the man was seated, staring sternly at something to the photographer’s left, and the woman was looking patiently, almost tolerantly at the camera, one hand on the man’s shoulder:  both wore rather severe, unrelieved black.

The photograph was surprisingly detailed, and Connie frowned a little as she saw the woman’s brooch, even her earrings were of polished, gleaming, absolute jet black.

Connie saw her studied gaze and smiled.

“That’s Linn and I, about a year ago.”

Wilma looked at her, surprised, looked back.

“The Old Sheriff and his wife Esther had a very similar portrait made, back in the 1800s, not long before she almost died when a relative went insane and attacked them both.”
Wilma’s mouth opened a little, half in dismay and half in surprise.

“I think Linn said he had a forensic psychiatrist examine the case.  There were no living witnesses, of course, but from his ancient grandfather’s Journals, the psych offered the opinion that the woman suffered manic depression.  In her mania she was brilliant, she was active – almost hyperactive – but when The Blackness was on her – that’s what the Old Sheriff said she called it, like a black pall draped over her soul – she became terribly depressed.

“The psychiatrist thought there may have been an organic component to it, because manic depressives almost never hurt anyone but themselves.”  She looked at the portrait, sadness creeping into her eyes.

“We had that made just before … there’d been a death in the family, so we dressed in mourning like our ancestors, and …”

 

Wilma dropped her head.

“I’m sorry. Bad memory.  Here, let me show you something you’ll like.”

She picked up a black-bound book, opened it – carefully, as if it were either delicate, or very valuable – she opened it to a bookmark, turned it, and as Wilma came over, offered it to her.

“Start halfway down the page, where it separates for the date.”

Wilma read.

 

Linn dipped his pen’s steel nib in good India ink, considered for a long moment, then wiped the excess off inside the bottle’s narrow neck, and began to write.

India ink gleamed wetly on good rag paper.

Part of Linn’s mind remembered either hearing or reading that paper was being made with wood pulp back East, but he himself would have none of it:  it smacked of cheapness, and he was not a man to entertain the cheap.

Besides, if a man’s fortunes failed him utterly, he could always be a rag picker at the local dump:  scrap rag was never wasted, if it could not be stitched into an article of clothing, used to patch clothing or be stitched into a quilt, it was sent off with other scrap to be shredded and made into rag paper.

His thoughts turned slowly, spun down his arm and through his hand and then through the pen, onto the paper, there to gleam and shine until they dried naturally, with a very black hue, or were blotted and looked slightly less distinct, and rather more grey.

I killed the barkeep that murdered the boy, he wrote, and damn me for not being faster.

I didn’t see him start to swing until the murderous maul came to the top of its arc, and though my shot was swift and true, that knotted up Osage orange root maul whipped right around and caved in the back of the boy’s head, killing him instantly.

I reloaded more of habit than of conscious thought:  my fingers knew their job and they worked without my supervision, and when my hand holstered the pistol, I could rely on its being truly loaded, and the hammer’s nose down on my buryin’ money, without having to look.

I paced over to the dying man and looked down at him and I spoke my contempt, but it was little use; I doubt if he heard a word of my condemnation, and likely the only thing he took into the Valley with him was the feeling of suffocation, for my shot took him through both lungs and the bottom of his black heart.

I looked down on the pitiful figure of the boy.

He was skinny as any orphan, bare legs stuck out the bottom of his knee pants and into the worn out miner’s shoetops he’d scrounged from somewhere.

His shirt was sacky big on him, a man’s shirt on an underfed boy’s frame, and his cap was greasy, dirty, pitiful as the dirty hair that stuck out from under … what there was that wasn’t clotting up with his blood and brains.

His watch, the watch I gave him, was still in his hand.

He was to meet me here at the corral at ten of the clock.

He was keeping his appointment and my asking him to that time gave the barkeep his chance to do him murder.

I swore at myself plenty for not being faster.

It was my fault the boy was there, though it was the barkeep’s fault that murder was done:  the boy was hungry, he stole beer because it was safer to drink than the arsenic pond or the lead mine water, or a creek with who knows what rotting in it upstream:  the Mercantile and I conspired, once the boy was seen pushing up a floor board and pilfering canned goods:  I paid the Mercantile for the goods, and he and I both saw to it that the boy had something to eat, even though he thought he was stealing them.

I bought me a blanket and a shovel from the Mercantile, and I wrapped the boy in the blanket, and it struck me it was likely the first and maybe the only blanket he could call his in his entire lifetime.

A damned shame it had to arrive after he was dead.

I packed him to the church yard and dug him a good hole, I planted him deep and laid rocks halfway down in the hole before I filled it the rest of the way with dirt.

Anything wants to dig him up for meat will not get through a good cribbin’ of rock.

I set a stone and I set cross legged on the ground and I looked at that stone slab, and I wondered what would a man carve on it.

I didn’t even know the boy’s name, let alone when he was born.

Finally I stood and swatted the dirt off my seat and I went on back to my own hacienda.

 

I hugged my wife and I hugged my little girl and that night I read to them from the Book the way I always did, and I kind of ground to a halt when I was a-readin’ of Job and his troubles, so I went to Ecclesiastes, for it is a favorite of mine, but the page fellow open and I read, “Vanity of vanities, all is vanities,” and I stopped.

I went over and I asked my wife to stand, and she did, and she gave me one of those odd looks a woman gives her husband when she wants him to think she’s puzzled, but she can see right through him.

I run my arms around my Esther and I held her, and I nuzzled into her hair and I smelled her lilac and her soap and the sun and the wind that clung to her from riding that day, and my wife was wise enough to just let me hold her.

I remembered how I took that watch I’d give the boy, and the note I’d wrote him.

I wrapped the watch in the note and I give that watch the same honorable interement with them beer bottles he’d hid under the loose board in front of the Mercantile, under the board walk.

I reckon a pack rat will drag it off, or someone will come a-scroungin’ and find it.

Maybe I should have buried it with the boy, but then that watch led him to his death. 

Maybe ‘twas for the best he was parted with it.

I caused him trouble enough.

 

Wilma ran her finger tips over the words, felt the slight, regular irregularities of a hand written account.

She wet her lips, looked up at Connie, handed her the book, then she brought her purse around and opened the clasp.

She reached in with two fingers, brought out something wrapped in dirty note paper, something with a cracked leather strap and a familiar looking railroad fob.

Wilma handed the watch to Connie.

“Here,” she whispered, “is the watch he gave the boy.”

Wilma shivered.

“I saw them.  I saw them both.  I saw the boy run out of the saloon and give Old Pale Eyes a beer – I saw him and – they both had a drink – your husband and I went over – he found –“

Wilma’s head felt suddenly light and her balance wasn’t what it should have been.

She looked at Connie, her eyes huge, wide, white around the edges.

 

Connie grabbed her arms, steered her over to the couch:  when the calves of Wilma’s legs touched the couch, her knees buckled, and a good thing, for if she hadn’t a padded surface to drop onto, she would have hit the ground:  her face was dead pale, her balance by now was completely shot, and she heard ten thousand August crickets singing in a dry field as the world sparkled like a bead curtain was being drawn across it.

Connie made sure Wilma wasn’t going to pitch forward onto the polished wood floor, then she walked over to the phone, tapped quickly at the buttons.

“Hi, Cindy, it’s Connie, is Linn there?”

“He’s talking to the prosecutor,” Cindy said, “and I don’t think it’s going very well!”

Connie’s eyes flicked back to the sagging guest, limp and pale-faced on the sofa.

“Well, when he gets back, could you tell him his wife said, ‘Bad Linn, smack hand!’”

 

“Excuse me,” Sheriff Linn Keller said, touching his hat brim and disengaging from the tourist group.

He shot a look at the barkeep.

Mr. Baxter, with his carefully curled, meticulously shaped and waxed mustache, with his pomaded hair combed to the sides, his white shirt and string tie and long white apron, looked very much the part of a Western barkeep in a fine establishment.  As a matter of fact it struck a somewhat jarring note to see the man pick up a cordless telephone and start pressing buttons.

Curious, the tourists migrated in an amorphous blob toward the windows, drawing the red-and-white-check curtains to the side to see what the fuss was about.

Down the street, the Firelands Police Department’s officer on duty started striding rather briskly up the cement sidewalk, frowning a little:  it was unusual for a couple to disagree loudly on the street, it was very unusual to have a domestic disagreement out in public, and doubly so to have one in the forenoon.  Usually, in his experience, domestics occurred behind closed doors, and much later in the day.

The exception that proves the rule, he heard somewhere in the back of his mind, a phrase spoken in his Police Basic class long years before. 

I hate exceptions, his own voice riposted, and then he leaned forward and began to sprint.

The Sheriff was coming out of the Silver Jewel, and the cop didn’t want that long tall drink of water making a collar in town.

“Should I wear a striped shirt, or can anyone join in?”  Linn asked, a smile on his face, and the couple turned and glared at this interruption, and the Sheriff’s amused expression and gentle voice broke their respective trains of thought and aggravation.

“You keep out of this!”  they both yelled, then looked at one another, surprised.

“YOU DON'T TALK LIKE THAT TO THE SHERIFF!” – “LOOK WHO'S YELLING NOW!” – “I’M NOT YELLING, YOU ARE!” – and the Sheriff laid a firm hand on his shoulder, and on hers, and shouted, “I CAN’T HEAR YOU, YOU’RE SHOUTING TO LOUDLY!”

This surprised them both again.

The Sheriff seldom if ever raised his voice for any reason, and that this soft-spoken man roared at them, startled them into a momentary silence.

They blinked.

Linn was tall and Linn was not what you’d call little by any means:  he was, however, remarkably stealthy of tread, he had the knack of turning invisible, or seemingly so, disappearing in a crowd of one, according to his Navajo segundo:  for all his height, he was also remarkably quick, and when the woman’s post-startle response was a combination backhand-and-claw, he swatted the backhand on around, seized her by the upper arm and the material between her shoulder blades, and drove her face first into the horse trough.

Her boyfriend took a step forward, cocking a fist, and he seemed to run into a fast moving boot sole traveling in the opposite direction:  the boot caught him just under the wish bone, drove every bit of wind out of him, and threw him backward just as the reactive splash of cold, clear, freshly pumped spring water, soaked through the Sheriff’s pants legs.

The Firelands patrolman ran up in time for the Sheriff to haul the woman out by the hair of her head:  she was too busy choking and gasping to utter any protest, and by the time she took her first good breath, she was suddenly realizing just how COLD!!! she was, and every last bit of fight was shocked out of her.

The Sheriff looked at the bug-eyed, panting patrolman.

“That one,” he nodded, “disturbing the peace, assault with intent to cause injury, assault on a law enforcement office, failure to obey a lawful order.  This one” – he gripped the woman under the arms, hauled her out, stood her up – “same charges.  Cuff him, I’ve got her.”

 

A boy’s voice inside the Silver Jewel was not loud, but plainly audible in the shocked, surprised silence.

“He really does use that horse trough!  That was cool!”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

16.  DADDY’S LITTLE GIRL

 

“I prefer to stand,” Sheriff Keller said mildly.

The county prosecutor glared at the lawman, pretended to sort through some papers on his desk.

“If you’re trying to show how important you are by ignoring me, you can go to hell and roast for a while,” Linn said pleasantly.  “I’ve got work to do.”

“Don’t you turn your back on me!”  the prosecutor shouted as the Sheriff turned and paced easily toward the door.

The Sheriff stopped, turned slowly, then paced back:  he rested his knuckles on the man’s desk and leaned over it, giving the scowling county prosecutor the full benefit of his cold, ice-pale eyes.

If one had the proper ghost hunting equipment, as a matter of fact, one might have picked up the residual energies from another pale-eyed Sheriff leaning on that desk in that very same manner … only on one’s hand-held ghost-scope, one would see a pale eyed woman in a tailored blue suit dress and heels, not the long, tall, lean waisted son of that pale eyed woman.

“You,” the Sheriff said quietly, “are a small man with a small amount of authority, and you have yourself confused with someone important.  Now you are on my side, mister, you work on my team, and if you don’t like it, why don’t you move out and let someone competent take over.”

“I can ride you out of town any time I want, Sheriff,” the prosecutor threatened.

The Sheriff smiled thinly.  “Any time you think you are man enough, jump right on, and now’s a good time.  I ought to be able to toss you out the nearest window in three seconds or less.”

“Are you threatening me, Sheriff?”

“You’re God-damn right I am threatening you, you miserable excuse for a human being.  Now if you have legitimate business that involves me, you will say it now, because if you don’t I will toss you out that window on general principles!”

The prosecutor took a long breath, blew it noisily out his nose:  the Sheriff plucked a tissue from the box on the man’s desk, held it out.  “You’ve got one a-danglin’,” he said quietly, and the attorney snatched the tissue, wiped savagely at the unintended disjecta from his less than impressive proboscis.

“It’s about that woman you arrested this afternoon –“

“Oh, yeah.  The domestic.  What about it?”

“She’s screaming excessive force.  You nearly drowned her!”

 

“I cooled her off.  She was so worked up it’s a wonder her hair didn’t ketch fahr.  Once I dunked her in that cold water it took all the fight out of her and she calmed right down.  It also gave me time to subdue the other half of the fracas, and he was not a weakling.”

“Holding someone’s head under water is hardly correct police procedure –“  the man shouted, and the Sheriff held up a forestalling palm.

“Hold it right there, cowboy,” he said mildly, his voice a reassuring rumble:  “I’ve got eyewitnesses and cell phone video that show the whole thing.  Now if you want to take those wild claims into the courtroom, I will discredit you all to hell and back and any time you bring anything at all before His Honor the Judge, he’ll remember the day I showed you to be a liar.  Is that what you want?”

There was a knock at the door, the sound of the latch turning:  the prosecutor’s secretary came into the room with the self-assured swagger of an executive secretary.  “Sheriff, an important call.”

“Not now, Margaret,” the prosecutor snapped.

“I’ll take it,” the Sheriff said quietly.

Margaret placed an octagonal pedestal on the desk – it was thick as two fingers and big around as a tea saucer – pressed a fingerprint pad on its surface and stepped back.

The prosecutor drew back, surprised:  it was a human figure – it was Marnie Keller, someone he’d gone to school with, someone he’d come to respect, partly because she just plainly mopped up the playground with him in grade school when he smacked her backside – only it was a very grown-up Marnie Keller, wearing an electric-blue, Olympic-grade skinsuit.

Her skincap was drawn back, like someone might throw back a sweatshirt hood, and her trim, close-fitting atmosphere helmet was nowhere to be seen.

She was obviously all woman, for the skinsuit was just that – it was intended for zero-atmosphere Olympic competition, and allowed the wearer maximum flexibility with minimum weight – but the regulation color, he knew, was white, or sometimes a silver-grey.

This was a shimmering, almost a satin-finish, electric blue … with a metallic-silver, six-point star over the left breast pocket.

A six point star with the single word SHERIFF across its face. 

“Sheriff Keller, this is Sheriff Keller,” Marnie said, her voice crisp, official.  “I promised you a story at eleven and it’s past curfew.  Please don’t ground me, Daddy.”

Marnie appeared to be facing each viewer:  to each person there, she was facing them squarely, and real enough – though somewhat miniaturized – that she … well, the illusion was so complete, it looked like you could touch her and feel her warmth, her lean muscles, the silky nature of her short-bob hair –

“At or about –“  she began, then frowned.

“The time’s not important.  I would have to convert Mars date and time to Earth standard and I don’t feel like it.”  She planted her knuckles on her belt, and only then did the prosecutor notice she carried a streamlined, almost toy-looking force-pistol on her side.  “It’s been a difficult day so let me get right to it.

“Daddy, you were right.  I lost a deputy today.  I didn’t know the man, I met him once and saw him once more and then he was murdered.”  Her eyes paled visibly as she framed the word.  “A miner went rogue and screwed a shaped charge on the end of a lance.  He threw it like a javelin and blew a hole through my deputy’s chest you could” – she held up her fist, looked at it and looked back up at the camera.
“Yeah.  I could have stuck my whole arm through his chest and out his back.”

Her voice was a little hoarse.

“I took out after him – Daddy, you remember that.”

Linn nodded.

He knew what it was to pursue a man, and to bring him in – alive, in irons, or in a zippered rubber sack, and when he went after a man under those circumstances, he honestly didn’t care which way it was.

“You taught me that much depends on the terrain and you taught me to use the terrain to my advantage.  You taught me the value of a native’s knowledge.”

Linn nodded again, remembering how his Mama had taken him out with a paintball marker apiece, how each had hunted the other:  it was at once great fun, and terrifying, and Linn learned from this – and from occasions when he was loaded with jacketed lead, instead of gel-caps of water-soluble paint – he learned well the truth of the saying, “There is no hunting like the hunting of men.”

“The miner knew the terrain,” Marnie continued.  “He suckered me, Daddy, and I was fool enough to fall for it.

“He was above me and lanced my skimmer as I came around a five meter tall rock.

 

“He got a lucky hit – the only place you could ever punch a hole and absolutely kill a skimmer."

Marnie shook her head.  

"He should have bought a lottery ticket with luck like that.  Those skimmers -- especially the police model I had -- those things have more battle damage switches and redundancy than a fighter jet and he killed it with one shot. She nosed down deader’n a politician’s promise and nearly flipped.

“I blew the canopy and come a-boilin’ out of the cockpit like a swarm of hornets and he took out a-runnin’ away from me” – her words were coming more quickly now, the way his Mama’s did when she was telling a story and the tale was getting legs as she told it – “and I drove a force-bolt at him.

“He knew the terrain, Daddy.  He knew this was the only place on the whole damned planet with enough magnetic field to sling that force-bolt the hell and gone wide.

“I took out a-runnin’ after him.

“He was in the issue suit and I was making him look like a one legged man wading through a molasses swamp, until he ducked around a rock.

“I stopped and looked around.  He’d suckered me once. I didn’t want suckered again.”

Marnie swallowed.

“Daddy,” she said a little more softly, “I am going to tell you something that did not go into the official report.  I received a diplomatic pouch and I am sending this back in the diplomatic pouch so it won’t be intercepted.  You are the only one to know this.

“In my official report, I claimed to have seized the explosive lance he dropped and drove it into his ribs.  Dr. Greenlees put his license on the line when he corroborated this on autopsy, and he had the carcass incinerated before anyone could find otherwise.”

She swallowed, took a long breath.

“Daddy … Grandma showed up, right there on the Martian surface.

“It is not possible” – she shook her head, made a slashing gesture with her hand – “it’s not possible, but Daddy … it was Grandma and she had her double gun, the one she used to outshoot you with.”

Linn grinned a little at this, for he remembered that double gun well.

“She drove both barrels into that Spall Peen’s ribs from fifteen feet and I heard the gunshots plain and I saw the black powder smoke rolling out the way it always did and I heard her shout – Daddy, she shouted, it was Grandma, I’d know her voice anywhere – she shouted ‘Nobody hurts my little girl!’ – she broke open the gun and reloaded and then she was gone.

“Daddy, I had the empty hulls in a sealed evidence bag.  They disappeared and the seals are intact, I had them in my personal safe.  The next day I get this in the diplomatic pouch.”

She picked up a holstered revolver, the gunbelt wrapped around it.

“You might recognize this, Daddy.”  She unsnapped the thumb break, withdrew what looked like a garden variety Victory model Smith & Wesson.

“This is the one Grandma had made … you remember when that fellow machine gunned her and it beat the hell out of her vest, but she survived, right there in front of your Sheriff's office?

You remember the Keller boy that run out of the school house because his Apple-horse was looking at him through the schoolroom window and how someone whispered in his ear his Mama needed him, and how a woman he pointed out in that glass plate print on your office wall" -- she winked -- "told him to slip in the back door and into his Mama's office and get his Granddad's revolver off the wall, and he used it to punch someholes in the assassin when he stopped to reload?

You remember" -- she looked down at the pistol and smiled a little, that quiet smile he remembered so well, it was his little girl's smile the time she won her first pistol tournament.

"You remember she had this one made to look identical to the original and to be put into evidence as the original, because her Daddy's original service revolver had to go in evidence and she didn’t want it lost, so she traded ‘em.  You have the actual original in your office.”  She slid the revolver back into its holster.

“There’s a note in here from Grandma.  She said I’d need this.  Now get this, Daddy.”

She held up a coin.

It had a rose on one side; she turned it over to display the superimposed Christian cross and the Seal of Solomon.

Marnie lowered the coin, read off its number, then held up a single, loaded pistol round.

“Gold,” she said.  “Pure gold.  Six of ‘em.  I’ve only seen these in .44-40.”

She placed pistol and cartridge on something lower than the camera’s eye.

“Daddy, I think the Sheriff is going to carry an old fashioned revolver on this new planet.  I’ve got an engineer who tells me there’s enough atmosphere I don’t have to worry about the bullets crowding out if I wear the pistol outside."

Her expression was suddenly serious.

“Daddy, you told me that I would always be Daddy’s little girl, and you would always keep me safe.  I’ll admit it would be nice to run up to you and hug you again like I used to … but we’re both law dawgs and who knows when we’ll be killed.” 

Her words were matter-of-fact, without emotion; a fact, plainly stated, nothing more.

"You are still doing that, Daddy.  You gave me a lifetime of bringin's-up and every last lesson you taught me is keeping me safe, just like you promised.

“Likely I’ll make my life here, Daddy.  We’re here to stay.  Record me something and remember it’ll be seen by more than just me, so nothing rude, crude, socially unacceptable, illegal, immoral or fattening.”

She never moved, but she changed:  she was once more the formal, official law enforcement officer.

 

“Sheriff Keller, thank you for the lifetime of training you’ve given me.  I think at one time or another I have used every last lesson in one fashion or another.” 

Marnie was trying to be official and somehow it didn’t last more than a few seconds.  She smiled a little and said “Even how you taught me to use a square, a miter box, a drill … you’d be amazed how much good honest construction there is here, and how often I put those things you taught me to use!”  She laughed.  “Even if it is plastiboard instead of wood!”

She reached down, as if for a control, hesitated, looked back up at the camera.

“I love you, Daddy,” she said, almost in a little girl’s voice, then she looked down, her shoulder dropped a half inch, and the solid-looking image was gone.

Prosecutor, secretary and Sheriff stared at the space where she’d been, and suddenly the room seemed quite empty.

Finally the Sheriff cleared his throat.

“That woman I dunked,” he said, “is some man’s little girl.  I give her another chance.  I could have punched her or used pain compliance and run the risk of hurtin’ her for real.  All I did was give her pride a cold bath.  Now you’re going to charge her with disturbing the peace and you’re going to recommend to the Judge that her and her man get marital counseling and if they don’t they’re goin’ in the hoosegow without benefit of the horse trough first.”

He watched as the secretary picked up the octagon projection plate, held out his hand as the secretary extended it to him.

“I knew her father,” the Sheriff said softly, thoughtfully.  “He’d understand.”

 

Later that night, the Sheriff went to the gun rack in his bedroom and took down his Mama’s double gun.

She’d had it restocked in curly maple and she’d had it restocked to fit her to perfection, and it hadn’t only just begun work when she died.

When he hung the gun up, he’d hung it up empty.

He took it down, hesitated.

“Bernardelli Gamecock,” he murmured.  “This little gun like to beat me to death.”

He pushed the lever to the side, broke it open.

It had been empty when he hung it on the gunrack.

Now it held two fired hulls.

He withdrew one, sniffed at it, nostrils flaring, then he raised the gun, peered through the barrels.

 

“Mama,” he said softly, “if you fired this, you cleaned it good.”

He blinked in surprise as he smelled roses – for just a moment – he smelled soap and lilac and he smelled the sun and the wind on clean bedsheets, then it was gone.

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

17.  EVIDENCE

 

Crystal leaned forward, fingers savoring the warmth of her heavy glass teacup.

“Oh, yes,” she said quietly, as if sharing a secret – she even looked left, looked right, leaned forward a little more.  “I’ve heard about that!”

“What did you hear?” Wilma asked, trying to contain her eagerness.

“If you leave canned goods in the back room of the Mercantile and then turn your back, you’ll hear a board move and when you look back, it’s gone!”

“Really!”  Wilma breathed, her eyes widening.

“When I was still in school it was kind of like something you had to do when you went out on a first date.  You had to go feed the ghost.”  She giggled, her face reddening a little.  “Most everyone just went over there to make out.”

Wilma looked over a set of non-existent spectacles and smiled knowingly.

“Two couples … a couple went over with us … they … we went in first and my date wouldn’t go in the back room.”  Crystal tried to look mature and matronly and the greying, dignified older woman managed to look like a cheerleader that got caught kissing in the hallway.  “I went back and watched, and I stared at the cans and the cupcakes and absolutely nothing happened.  I got bored and turned to go and there was a … I heard a board scrape, and …”

She swallowed, closed her eyes as she filed the memory back into the filing cabinet drawer between her ears.

She opened her eyes and smiled a little.

“We can go over if you’d like,” Crystal offered.

Wilma downed the rest of her tea, wiped a dribble from her chin: “Yes!”

A half hour later, she stood in what used to be the main street of what used to be Carbon Hill.

Crystal drove as far as she felt safe; the road was not good this far out and it was worse ahead, and so she and Wilma walked, and as they walked, the chatted, and as they chatted, they looked around:  Wilma, because she was anxious to see everything, and Crystal, because somehow she assumed that ghosts were attracted to ghost hunters, and though shades, spooks and spirits weren’t supposed to show themselves in daylight, she knew there were exceptions.

Wilma shaded her eyes, looking around.

“The church was over there,” Crystal offered, pointing: “the graveyard is still there, it didn’t cave in when the tornado came through.  I think what was left of the church either got scavenged or hauled off or something.  There wasn’t much to it anyway.  I don’t think it ever had stained glass windows or anything like that.”

Wilma almost ran to the graveyard.

She was like a questing hound, bisecting the garden of stone, then quartering it, searching:  finally she stopped, looked at a stone, knelt.

The stone was unmarked, almost smooth.

“This has to be it,” Wilma whispered, her fingertips gentle on the smooth, finished, uncut surface.  “This has to be yours!”

Wilma laid a warm hand on its top edge, bit her bottom lip:  she got up, looked closely at the back side of the stone, looked around, then finally picked up her plastic grocery sack and walked slowly back to the middle of the street, back to the front of a stack of sagging boards and crooked, empty window casings, with an almost legible sign that declared in very faded paint, M RCANTI.

She looked into the open doorway – the door, or what was left of it, hung from one hinge; she walked gingerly over boards that sagged underfoot, as if barely able to bear her weight:  she made it to the middle of the ruined room, looked suspiciously at the second story (which was now down into about half the first floor) and sidled through a leaning trapezoidal opening that, if imagination could be believed, was once a squared-up doorway into a back room.

She looked around.

The back room was in as bad a disrepair as the front; she had no idea where she might best set her canned goods, but she reached into the blue-plastic bag and brought out a can of stew, a can of pork and beans, and a plastic wrapped cupcake.

She bent and set these in the middle of the floor – she didn’t know where else to put them – and she turned, looking for the best place to set her feet, the places where she’d be less likely to go through the floor.

Something scraped behind her.

Wilma jumped, turned, clutching the empty bag to her chest –

The canned goods were gone.

Crystal stepped back as Wilma came streaking out the front door, a blur of denim and wide-white eyes, and she turned, looked back at the Mercantile, shivering visibly.

“The cans?”  Crystal asked.

Wilma pointed, her finger trembling.

“Gone?”

Wilma nodded.

Crystal smiled a little, took her hand.  “Come with me.”

The two women walked to the little cemetery.

A gust of wind boomed down what used to be the main street of Carbon Hill, and for a moment they heard trace chains and voices, laughter and a piano, they smelled tobacco smoke and wood smoke and a snatch of song, sung with an odd accent – German?  Bulgarian?  Wilma wondered, and then she froze, her fingers digging painfully into Crystal’s arm.

The two women walked slowly, slowly up to the grave with the unmarked stone.

The cans were there.

Empty.

Their lids had been crudely hacked open; the insides were as clean as if they’d been commercially prepared:  the clear-plastic cupcake wrapper was weighted down by the empty stew can.

A gust of wind again, a little boy’s voice:  “Thank you,” and the wind chased itself up the street, and was gone.

 

 

The Sheriff looked at the holo-camera, held up two fired shotgun shells.

“Marnie,” he said, “I think I found what you were looking for.”

He held them up.

“When I …"

He frowned, tried again.

"Your Grandma had her bird gun restocked in curly maple.”  He reached over, picked up the double gun, held it up in front of him at chest level.  “This is some of the nicest wood I have ever seen."

He turned the bird gun a little, giving the camera a good view of the handmade, beautifully finished gunstock and fore-end.

"She commissioned the work the day before she died and when I hung it on the gun rack it was empty.”

He held up the two fired hulls.

“The day after your communication, I found these in the breech, and the bores clean. If you smell these empties” – he sniffed at their blown-out crimp – “these were loaded with the Holy Black.”

He leaned back and smiled.

“And when I pulled these out of Mama’s gun, I smelled her roses again, and soap and lilac water like she wore, and  bedsheets dried in the sun.”

He looked directly at the camera.  "I am not given to fancy, Marnie.  I think in terms of what I can present to a jury, I think in terms of evidence, of that which can be proven."

He blinked, considering, then looked down at his Mama's bird gun and back up to the camera, his voice soft:  “I think sometimes we’re not meant to have a neat scientific explanation.”

“You can say that again,” a voice said from the conference room doorway.

Linn turned.  “Miss Kincaid.  Please come in” – he frowned, his voice reflecting his concern.  “Here, sit down, tell me what happened.”

“How did you know –“

“How'd I know something happened? I know that look.  Were you hurt?”

Wilma laughed, shook her head.

“No,” she admitted, “but I found his grave.”

“His grave … whose grave?”  Linn frowned, puzzled.  “I’m missing something here.”

 

Two days later, in the Sheriff’s quarters in the Second Martian District – which was more often being called Firelands, at least locally – Sheriff Marnie Keller placed her finger on the fingerprint-pad, activating the holo-comm.

Marnie watched her father’s solid-looking holographic message, nodding as she did.

She, too, had visited the Carbon Hill Mercantile.

She’d left canned goods in the back room, back when she was in high school, she left the comestibles in the very center of the room, and she’d cleaned up the empty cans from the grave with the unwritten stone.

She never knew the whole story, only that she’d been told the old Carbon Hill Mercantile was haunted.

She never knew why it was haunted, or by whom, at least not until her father turned away from the stranger and looked at the holo-camera.

“Marnie,” he said, “I found a watch,” and then he told her the story of a watch, and a pale eyed Sheriff, and a little boy in ragged pants and a dirty shirt, and a stone left blank because nobody knew a name to put on the stone.

“This is Wilma Kincaid,” the Sheriff concluded, nodding to the woman, who smiled uncertainly a the holo-camera.

“She’s a ghost hunter and she was looking for some evidence that there are ghosts and that they are active.”

He smiled a little.

“I think all three of us have found evidence that says yes … there are ghosts, and yes, they’re active.”  He looked at the holo-camera and laughed that good easy laugh that Marnie remembered so well, that laugh that she missed, along with the strong arms that held her like Daddy’s little girl loved being held.

“Now I could also tell you about grabbin’ one half a domestic disagreement and baptizin’ her in that co-o-o-old waterin’ trough in front of the Jewel, but then I’d have to tell you about discussin’ matters with the prosecutor and gettin’ kind of irritated, but that would take too much time.”  He gave the camera lens a wise look and a blue-suited Sheriff on another planet giggled when she saw That Look.

“Marnie,” Linn said softly, “Hebrews twelve-one.”  He smiled gently and then raised his chin.

“Sheriff Keller, this is Sheriff Keller,” he said formally.  “Be safe and be well and I look forward to seeing you again.”

 

It is well that the holo-camera stopped recording in that moment, for but a few seconds later, this lean old lawman had to stop and wipe the damp from his eyes.

“Now, Miss Kincaid,” he said briskly, harrumphing and turning to his visitor, "my daughter described a ghostly encounter on Mars, if you'd like to see the recording."  He folded his red-and-white hardware-store bandanna and thrust it back into a hip pocket.  "And now that you are here, may I offer you coffee, and how fares your research?”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

18.  THE PRUSSIAN AFFAIR

 

“Digger.”

The undertaker looked up, over his pince-nez spectacles, blinking at the sound of the pale eyed Sheriff’s voice.

“Fetch up the dead wagon and a good coffin.”

“What size, Sheriff?”

“Roberta Allen size.”

Digger’s shoulders sagged.  “Oh dear, oh dear,” he murmured, shaking his head sadly.  “So sad, so sad!”

“Yeah,” Linn said shortly.

“And the deceased is where, Sheriff?”

“In her own bed, under her own roof.”

The Sheriff was almost right.

Roberta was indeed under her own roof, but her agonies had carried her off her bed and onto the floor.

It was certainly not unknown, then or now, for a soul to release itself from this earth with its own hand; then or now, it tended to be a tragedy for those left behind, and this was.

Robert Allen, her husband, was not a terribly honest man:  he’d served in the Army, he’d been county Sheriff back east, he’d taken his share of bribe money and done his share of dirty deals, but for the most part he’d been decent enough when he arrived in Firelands County.

Linn hadn’t had to have a Dutch uncle talk with him; he knew Allen was less than completely comfortable in his presence, but many men with a stained conscience were so, and Linn thought this not at all unusual.

Robert and Roberta were known in town as decent folks, Allen worked hard to keep his small ranch up and his wife worked hard to make him a good home, and he’d never pulled the dirty deals in Firelands he’d tried back East, probably (the Sheriff suspected) because he’d asked around and found that Old Pale Eyes didn’t stand for that kind of foolishness, and he watched as Long Tall and Skinny found and foiled three such attempts – one ending with the bank manager heading for (and dying in) prison, one with the fellow who bought out the Mercantile being roundly beaten, his accounts seized through court action, and the man being very publicly sent to prison, in irons, while his weeping wife turned in shame from him and left to go back East, back to Indiana.

Now Robert Allen, more lost and more alone than he’d ever been, sat on his front porch, staring into the distance, remembering.

He remembered his wife’s smile, he remembered how she felt, how she smelled, he remembered her laugh and her sigh and the feel of her fingers as they trailed through his chest hair, and he remembered seeing her on the floor with that little brown bottle in her hand.

He blinked and looked at the little box in his hand.

His wife sent off for it and her ordering note was inside the box, a note in her own lovely, flowing hand, a note that said “Please send me one ounce of your strongest Hydrocyanic Acid, I enclose payment in full” – hydrocyanic acid, she’d written, and on the reverse of the note, “One ounce of Prussic Acid enclosed per your request. Please handle with care when compounding this solution, it is a deadly poison.”

He folded the note in two, as it  had been; it curled into a circle, as it had been wrapped around the round bottle and carefully packed in excelsior, then enclosed in the slip over cardboard box.

He slid the lid back onto the box and tossed it to the side.

His wife had drunk the prussic acid.

She'd committed suicide.

 

Linn paced his stallion to keep up with Digger’s wagon.

He and the dead wagon and the top-hatted undertaker and the undertaker’s assistant drew up in front of Allen’s front porch.

Linn dismounted.

“I heard,” he said as Allen rose.

Robert Allen, like any man running a working ranch, was neither of really slight build, nor was he in any means weak:  lean, yes, but lean and rangy men are strong men, and he was both:  now, though, now as he turned his eyes to the Sheriff, he looked to have all the power of an underfed field mouse, all the vigor of a slab of side meat waiting to be fried up for breakfast, and as lost as any soldier on any of the battlefields that still haunted the Sheriff’s nighttime.

Allen automatically extended his hand, and the Sheriff gripped it, for he knew the fell of another man’s hand in his own is a steadying thing in time of trouble, and the Sheriff knew from losing his own wife that right now Allen was as unsteady as he probably ever was in his entire lifetime.

Digger and his assistant lifted the coffin – it was one of the better boxes, and they carried it past the two men, and into the house.

“Allen,” the Sheriff said, “wait here, I will be back out.”

Allen nodded, sat back down, staring into the distance.

 

The four men set the coffin up on saw horses in the parlor.

The Sheriff found an extra bed sheet to cover the rough lumber saw horses, to fashion what had to pass for a catafalque.

“I’ll get hold of the Parson,” Linn said.  “we’ll set up a time that’s handy for you.”

Allen nodded, numb.

“You got anyone who can come over?”  Linn asked quietly.

Allen shook his head.

“Hired men?  Kinfolk?  In-laws?  Outlaws?”

“No.”  Allen shook his head slowly.  “No one.”

“It’ll get lonesome settin’ up tonight,” Linn said.  “Why’nt I come on out.  I’ll set with you.”

Allen nodded.  “I’d take that kindly.”

Linn gripped the rancher’s shoulders gently.  “You et today?”

Allen shook his head.  “Not since breakfast, no.”  He looked up at the lawman, grief carved in deep slashes at the corners of his weather wrinkled eyes.  “I go no stomach for eatin’.”

“Why’nt you come on home with me.  I hate eatin’ alone my own self.  Digger can stay and we’ll have Jacob and his wife come out on our way back.”

Allen shook his head.  “No.  I’ll not trouble you.  Thank’ee for the offer, Sheriff.”

Linn nodded, shook the man’s hand again.

As he rode back, following Digger’s wagon, he expected to hear a gunshot.

He didn’t.

What he did hear was the brisk cadence of hoofbeats, the jingle of harness bells:  his stallion felt the man’s shift in the saddle and responded with a quick turn, a spin.

Daisy yelled at the rented gelding:  “Whoa there you knot headed excuse for a horse!  Sheriff, shame be wid’ ye, layvin’ that puir man alone wi’ his wife’s body!”

Linn looked at Digger, nodded.  “Go on back,” he said, and Digger touched his silk topper’s brim:  turning, he flipped the reins, resumed his journey back to town.

“And another thing,” Daisy continued, coming out of her buggy at the top of her lungs, “ye’ve made a puir old widow-woman get her arthritis an’ her aches an’ pains out of a comfortable bed!  I’ve had t’ work an’ t’ cook  an’ I’ve spent guid money –“

Linn swung out of the saddle, turned and seized the woman in a bear hug:  Daisy struggled and kicked him in the shin – “Ye great lug, I’m an honest woman, put me down!”

Linn picked her up and swung her around, laughing, his head thrown back, his strong man’s laughter filling the heavens overhead:  in spite of her feigned indignation, Daisy could not help but laugh as well.

Linn set her down, his eyes darkened with laughter, and a quiet smile Daisy had not seen since the man’s wife passed away in childbirth.

“Don’t change, Daisy,” he said softly, almost sadly.  “Don’t ever change.”

Daisy hauled off and smacked her fist in the middle of the man’s chest:  “And wha’ d’ ye think I’m a-gon’ ta do, ya lunk! Wha’d I change into, d’ye think?” 

Daisy planted her knuckles on her hips and glared at the quietly chuckling badge packer.

“Thank you, Daisy,” Linn said quietly. 

“Save it,” she snapped.  “Has he killed himself yet?”

Linn looked along his back trail, back toward the ranch house.

“No.”

Daisy whirled and climbed awkwardly into the carriage; Linn glided over to his stallion, slung a leg over good saddle leather, followed Daisy back to the ranch house.

 

Robert Allen stared sightlessly at the coffin.

It was considerably more expensive than anything he’d ever figured to purchase.

He looked down at the revolver in his hand.

Like any lawman he’d made enemies, like any lawman he knew what it was to have people come after him, and he knew what it was to have to stop them.

He hadn’t had to fire a shot for serious purposes – not a pistol shot, anyway – since he crossed the Mr. and Mrs. Sippi.

He’d worn the Remington as regularly as he’d worn his trousers, and now …

He blinked, looked at the coffin.

It looked like any of the fine coffins he’d seen back East, and he’d seen too many of them, mostly for family, some for kinfolk, several not.

It looked like a finely crafted, beautifully polished, wood box.

I’ll pay for it, he thought, somehow …

He looked up as impatient knuckles rapped his closed front door.

Allen looked up, his expression that of an absolutely uncaring man.

Daisy opened the door, shoved it with her shoulder, scolded her way inside with a checkered-cloth basket in each hand:  “Now don’t ye be just sittin’ there, ye’ve guests, get on yer feet an’ be gracious!” she snapped.  “And set yersel’ down a’ th’ table, man!  I went t’ th’ trouble of fixin’ ye a guid meal an’ ye’ll eat it!”

Daisy’s sharp words and sharper tongue startled the man.

He opened his mouth, stood, looked at the pistol in his hand.

“I reckon a fork would be easier,” Linn drawled as he brought in two more baskets.  “I never tried eatin’ with a gun barrel myself.”

Allen blinked and holstered the Remington.

“Well don’t just stand there,” Daisy scolded, stopping and glaring at him with those startling Irish-green eyes:  “get outside an’ wash yer hands before ye eat, man!  Ye’re no’ a common barbarian!”

That night, as was custom, family sat up with the deceased, the only light that of beeswax tapers, and an old lawman sat up with the only living family that was left.

Allen hadn’t said anything when Linn laid a hand on his shoulder and said “You won’t have to watch alone,” but he’d been powerful grateful to the man.

Now and then through the night his front door would open, someone would come in, another would go out: more than the iron-mustached lawman sat with the grieving, lonely rancher.

Several more.

  in days and years that followed, he remembered seeing many familiar faces, he remembered hearing many voices, though he himself was numb:  that night, and when they gathered around the straight-sided, square-cornered hole someone dug in the family’s graveyard up on the hillside, people spoke to him, spoke carefully-crafted words.

He remembered not a single one of those carefully selected words that were spoken to him in his time of grief, but he never, ever forgot each and every soul who cared enough to speak those words.

One week to the day after he stood beside that hole in the ground, one week after he’d dropped a handful of soil on his wife’s box, one week after he turned his back and walked away from what was left of his chosen life’s partner, the one and only woman he'd ever truly, absolutely, desperately loved, he was driving into town to return the several baskets that had been brought out – baskets and dishes, cloths, all clean, all fit to be handed back, with his thanks.

He’d got a little more than half way to Firelands when he ho’d his dapple, stood, up, worked his jaw, listening.

What did I just hear –

There –

He frowned into the distance, cocked his head, heard it again.

He sat, flipped the reins, turned the wagon off the roadway, staring at the distant ranch house.

The wind was carrying toward him.

Sound follows wind, he knew, that was a piece off, but it would be difficult to hear –

His blood chilled several degrees when he heard it.

The sound of a woman, a woman’s scream, a woman in agony.

He looked down at his rifle beside him on the seat, laid it down on the floorbards so it wouldn't bounce out, and he snapped the reins hard.

“YAP!” he snapped.  “YAP NOW!”

The grey’s head came up and he stepped out at a good brisk pace – too brisk a pace, Allen knew, for his wagon was not sprung and though his seat was, he still stood a good chance of being thrown if he went much faster.

He crossed about half the ground between here and there when he heard the scream again.

He brought the rifle up across his lap, his eyes busy – he didn’t see anything – no horses, no signs of fire, nobody in sight –

He drew the grey up beside the barn, set the brake, looked around, suspicious:  old reflexes, old instincts came to the fore:  he rolled out of the wagon, scuttled quickly for the barn, came around the corner, rifle up, rifle ready –

No.

No ambush here.

He turned, looked around, an old familiar tightness in his chest, gripping his belly.

He ran.

Allen sprinted for the ranch house, yanked the latch string, shoved the door open with his foot, standing back in case he’d be met with a swarm of angry hornets disguised as buckshot.

Nothing.

“HELLO!” he shouted.  “HELLO THE HOUSE!”

He heard something from within – more of a gasp, then a woman’s long, sustained groan.

“IT’S ALLEN!  WHO’S HERE?”

He swung around, rifle barrel swinging to cover the interior: he took a cautious step, another, then with quick, light steps he went from one room to another, to the third.

He froze.

Allen parked his rifle beside the doorway, shucked quickly out of coat and hat, he crossed the room, staring at the blood, at the gasping woman.

He knew what to do.

Allen went to work, his hands sure, his hands strong and decisive.

 

Two hours later, when the rancher returned home, he found a strange man in his wife’s bedroom.

He found a grinning Robert Allen, shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows, knuckles red and raw from washboarding bed sheets and the quilt, a Robert Allen who walked across the room with a small, a tiny figure, wrapped in a small blanket that had been folded and made ready for the occasion.

Robert Allen was not known for his fine oratory, but on this occasion, he had the perfect speech, and he delivered it flawlessly.

He handed the man a little, red-faced, squinting, wiggling little baby, all wrapped up, fed, warm, changed and restless at being handled, and as the new father received this new addition to his family, Allen orated at length.

“Congratulations, Father, you have a daughter.”

The new father walked slowly to his wife, went down on one knee, his expression soft, wondering.

His wife reached up and caressed his cheek.

Allen turned his head as the woman spoke, and he cat footed for the door and got the hell out of there so they couldn’t see his face.

The rancher’s wife had looked past her husband, she’d looked at Allen when she spoke.

The rancher’s wife said, “Her name is Roberta.”

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

19.  HORSES, BOATS AND MINES

 

The Sheriff thought he was going to have to dump the water bucket down the back of the man’s shirt collar to cool him off.

He was obviously not from around here:  his suit was no better than that the House of McKenna made for the pale eyed Sheriff and his pale eyed son, but it was a cut-and-a-half better than what a man could buy off the shelf:  the townie shoes were glossy, shiny, cheap looking to be honest, but a man could buy such from the Sears and Sawbuck Catalog.

The man was not a dandy, but he was perfumed, probably from his latest factory made shave-and-a-haircut, where both he and the barber enjoyed the benefits of bay rum.

No, it wasn’t so much his appearance as his behavior that marked him probably an Easterner, and an unhappy Easterner at that.

He’d come into the Sheriff’s office agitated … no, not so much agitated as maybe wound up like an eight day clock, by appearance ready to start whirling like a Dervish, or maybe a minor tornado:  his hands fluttered to his hat, his beard, to the pockets of his coat and back to his hat:  he frowned, he peered, he grimaced, he looked at the Sheriff and stretched his hands out beseechingly, his mouth working, and finally the lean lawman opened his bottom drawer and pulled out a bottle of something water clear and not over 30 days old.

“I reckon,” Linn drawled, “if you don’t set down you’re gonna start spinnin’ and if you start that you’ll bore a hole in my floor or buzz saw through my roof and neither way do I want to go fixin’ things today, now SET DOWN!”

The man sat, still agitated, his hands still rising, falling, opening, closing: he thrust a hand in his coat, jerked forth a folded sheaf of papers, held them forth, rattling them and blurted, “The mine, the mine, my investment –“

Linn handed him a squat, faceted, heavy bottom glass of something shimmering and colorless as a tired woman’s voice.

The visitor looked at it, then drank it down as if it were water.

He handed the glass back and Linn turned and set it back on his desk, then turned back to the visitor in time to see the potent payload hit bottom.

Where the man had manifested the  outward appearance of a Tarantella, or perhaps a sufferer of the St. Vitus’ Dance, now he had the general expression of someone who just realized he’d swallowed a small keg of dynamite, and said keg just detonated somewhere north of his belt buckle but south of his wish bone, and a little puff of smoke came out his mouth as he gasped, “Good,” then, “stuff!”

“I thought that might help.”  The Sheriff seized a chair, spun it into position, parked his carcass facing the wide-eyed, well-dressed visitor.  “Now what brings you to my particular county?”

He listened as the man, partly stunned, partly anesthetized and partly shocked into slowing down enough to be understood, described his situation.

He brought out the papers again, not rattling them with his previous vigor, neither was he waving them with his earlier agitation:  the Sheriff primed him with another tilt of Old Stump Blower to further soothe his nerves, and this time, his taste buds seared and nonfunctional, his well dressed guest sipped the distilled libation instead of gulping.

“Now walk that a-past me one more time,” the Sheriff said mildly, his voice deep, reassuring:  “tell me about the Carbon Hill mine.”

The man shivered, finished the last of the Daine boys’ tonic, handed the glass back and began sorting through his folded papers.

 

Over in Carbon Hill, miners sweated, swore and swung picks, plied shovels, filled mine cars:  tough little mine ponies leaned into their collars – they were called mine ponies, most were actually mules, bred small for the mines back East and freighted West at a small phenomenal cost – it was the prosperous mine indeed that could afford mine ponies, most used manpower to save money – rumbling cars loaded with lignite emerged into the daylight, the miner’s token was retrieved from the hook on front or rear of the car so the paymaster would know who to credit with this load – many of the miners came from the bituminous mines back East, men who knew their work, hard-muscled men with calluses and a cough and a life foreshortened by their trade.

Brown coal or good black New Straitsville bituminous, it was all coal, it was all work; the mines out West tended to explode less often, and miners’ wives were happier with this:  those who came West brought with them memories of horror, memories of watching that dirty-yellow gout of flame that shot out of one mine or another, followed by clouds of smoke and of dust while the steam-whistle shrieked its short hoots of alarm, while men gathered and swore and wives and daughters clustered and wept, and while the mine bosses swore and uttered false words of comfort while calculating lost profits from the explosion:  these were nightmares that woke women, wide-eyed and shivering, women who reached over to find their exhausted husband, asleep beside them, or who found an empty bed and experienced a moment’s panic, until remembering that no, he was working the night shift, he was working, she was in her own bed, all was well, and then she sat awake for hours, listening, remembering, and finally lay down shortly before daybreak, to wake as tired as her husband when he finally came home with the sun’s rising.

Carbon Hill was so named by a man who wanted to make money, a man who went East and sold shares and sold deeds and sold rights to men who’d mined the black diamond strata in Perry County, in Mingo County, in Harlan County:  they spoke of riches under the mountain, waiting for men with picks and drills to bust it loose and haul it out, riches to line a man’s pockets, and investors wrote checks and drew out their savings and dreamed of becoming wallowing rich.

The man who sat before the Sheriff was one such investor.

He’d just come back from Carbon Hill.

He’d expected another Hocking-under-the-Hill, he’d expected a Sunday Creek Coal Company sized operation:  instead, he found a dying town made of dirt, warping boards, tired men and women whose faces told of a loss of hope.

He’d come West expecting his fortune would be waiting for him in great, glittering heaps, he’d come West with the firm conviction that he was a wealthy man indeed.

He’d just come back from Carbon, from examining the mines into which he’d bought, he’d just come back with the realization that he’d broken even – at best, he’d made his expenses plus about a thousand dollars – a decent profit for the average working man, but for an investor who expected to rival the legendary Rockefeller?

The Sheriff nodded sympathetically.

“Come with me,” he said, taking the man’s elbow:  the stranger allowed himself to be raised; he stood, getting used to the deck underfoot, for it seemed to wobble a little, then steadied.

“Walk with me.”

The Sheriff led the man back outside, the two stepped off the board walk and into the street.

The Sheriff laid a hand on his stallion’s neck.

“Friend,” he said, “do you know what this is?”

The investor blinked, surprised.  “A horse,” he said, “I believe … an Appaloosa?”

“No.”  The Sheriff smiled a little, just a little – not much more than a tightening of the corners of his eyes, but the smile was audible in his words.  “This is a factory.”

He rubbed the stallion under the jaw.

“You feed money in this end,” he said quietly, “and work comes out the other end.”

It took a moment but the investor chuckled as the humor manifested itself in his recovering brain.

The Sheriff turned and they resumed their walk across the street.

“A friend of mine is a mariner,” the Sheriff continued.  “He said a boat is a hole in the water that you throw money into.  He invested in fishing vessels and the fishing industry and he lost his shirt twice but made it back.  He’s never made a fortune – he’s done little more than brake even – but it’s a kind of gambling, and a gambler gets a taste of the gold bug and he never recovers.  Likely my friend will be legally gambling that game they call investing for the rest of his life.”

They continued to the other side of the dirt street and walked down the boardwalk, downhill past the schoolhouse and the tidy, whitewashed church, just past the bank.

The Sheriff opened the door for the investor.

“This is the office of Michael Moulton.  He’s our local attorney and he handles all the mineral rights, all the deeds.  If anyone can answer your questions about the Carbon Hill mines, he is your man.”

A greying man with a stout waist and thinning hair opened a door and smiled at the Sheriff.

“Mr. Moulton,” the Sheriff said without preamble, “this man has some questions about the Carbon Hill coal mines, please render him any aid and assistance he may require.”

“Of course, Sheriff.  Please come in, sir, and how may I be of service?”

The Sheriff turned and went back outside, closing the door quietly behind him.

He stopped on the board walk, heard a child’s laughter from his left, toward the schoolhouse:  he recognized the voice, though a name didn’t come immediately to mind.

The advantage of working here, he thought.

I know every one of the schoolchildren, and they know me.

Hell, their dogs know me!

He surveyed the street with pale eyes, automatically assessing any ambush points.

Poor fellow, he thought, coming all the way out here, thinking he was getting a big fat profitable coal mine.

The Sheriff shook his head, paced slowly toward the Silver Jewel.

From what I’ve seen, Carbon Hill’s coal mines are kind of like that fishing fleet.

Horses, boats and coal mines.

They eat money and produce work.

He touched his hat brim as a familiar figure hailed him from the side porch of the Parsonage.

“Sheriff, I’ve some fresh pie cooling, would you like some?”

The Sheriff stopped, and Mrs. Parson saw the corners of the man’s eyes crinkle up a little with pleasure.

“Yes, Ma’am,” he replied, “I surely would!”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

20.  BACK TRACK

 

Gieuseppe unwrapped the Sheriff’s face, spun the shaving brush briskly in its cup, making a fine, thick lather.

“What’s-a thinkin’ you, Sheriff?” he asked quietly as he expertly applied the fresh lather to the lawman’s face:  his moves were deft, quick, with the swift assurance of a professional and well experienced barber.

Linn grunted, not wanting to spoil the luxury of the moment.  It was rare for him to get what his pale eyed ancestor called a “factory made haircut” but today he not only came to Gieuseppe’s for a haircut, but for a straight razor shave.

German steel whispered on razor’s strop as the Italian regarded the supine lawman with amused black eyes.  “You a-thinkin’, Sheriff,” he declared, shaking the razor in emphasis, then resuming his long, smooth strokes on the stretched leather:  “you don’t-a come in here unless you thinkin’!”

He frowned at the edge, gave it a few more strokes, nodded.

Linn’s eyes were closed and he was relaxed.

It was rare that he relaxed in public; only the presence of his obsidian eyed segundo allowed him the luxury now:  with the hot, steaming towel wrapped over his face, he was effectively blind; with the Italian carefully removing whisker-stubble and soap-foam from his face, he dare not move:  he knew Gieuseppe had to shave a balloon in barber school (without bursting it!) and he knew Gieuseppe routinely shaved a balloon, outdoors, as part of his good-natured advertising.

He also knew there were people who bore him ill will and would cheerfully do very nasty things to him, given the chance, and becoming intentionally blind, in public, was a fine invitation to such unpleasant people.

With his chief deputy present, however, he could relax, and he did.

“Gieuseppe,” Linn replied, moving lips and jaw just as little as possible, “how far back can you follow your family?”

Gieuseppe lifted the razor and laughed that contagious laugh of his, bringing a smile even to the normally impassive Navajo chief deputy:  “Mi familia?  Back to the time of the Medici!  We were confidantes of Il Papa!”

He resumed his sculpting of the Sheriff’s face, his strokes careful, precise.

“You know-a da Swiss Guard?” he continued quietly.  “They wear-a da pantalones, they got-a da stripes?”  He drew back, raised an emphatic finger to the stamped-tin ceiling:  “They wear-a da colors of mi familia!  Medici!”

“Sheriff,” Barrents quietly offered from his station against the opposite wall, “didn’t your mother know some of the Swiss Guard?”

Linn waited until Gieuseppe drew back to wipe the excess off his razor before replying.

“She did,” he confirmed.  “Apparently she had a reputation over there.  They were cycled back and she spent some time in Israel.  I don’t know how it ended up but she was paired up with a Texan – he was EW on an Aegis-class ship – and they found out trail rides were popular with Israelis.”

Gieuseppe stopped, surprised, blinking, his expression as effective a question as any words.

The Sheriff nodded; only then did Gieuseppe resume his work.

Linn lifted his chin and with a half-dozen strokes the work was done:  with a freshly-shaved face, clean and anointed with genuine Bay Rum, the Sheriff waited until Gieuseppe set the chair back up before moving.

The Italian barber gripped the lawman’s upper arm.  “Trail rides,” he prompted, and the Sheriff sat back down, grinning.

“Now this is all hearsay,” he admitted, “I was not there.  This is what Mama told me.” 

At this, the barber inclined his head a little, the Chief Deputy leaned forward, and newspapers and cell phones were lowered, for any time the Sheriff spoke of his Mama, it was not only with due respect, it was almost always interesting.

“Mama was on liberty or leave or whatever they call it now and she went on a trail ride in Israel.  She said the Old West and trail rides are very popular over there.  She said they had the ugliest jug headed, pig eared nags with the worst looking collection of mismatched, patched, cobbled up tack she’d ever seen, and she said that Texas Navy man walked up to the nastiest, most ill-tempered horse there and before the Israeli handler could warn him off, that Texan was rubbing the horse’s ears and bribing it with something and calling it a good boy, and that horse started to follow him around like a dog.”

The Sheriff laughed a little.

“She said that Texan had the horse saddled, bridled and ready to go in three seconds flat, he was in the saddle and looking around and said “Where we headed?” and everyone else had to catch up!”

“How was your Mama with a Hebrew horse?”  Barrents asked with a knowing look.

Linn laughed.  “She’d already picked her horse and she’d bribed him too.  She wasn’t as good as that Texan, I think she said it took he six seconds to get geared up.”  The lawman’s smile was soft, as were his eyes, as he spoke of the memory, and in his memory he heard the tale again, in her voice.

“She said riding in Israel was interesting, and she enjoyed it, and she said the tourists thought it was noteworthy that the point rider had an Uzi across his back, and so did Tail End Charlie.”

“Your Mama wasn’t …?”  Gieuseppe let the question dangle as he washed off the razor, put it in the rack.

“No.  No, as a foreign national they couldn’t officially allow her to carry weapons.”  He smiled.  “But like I said, her reputation preceded her and she had a conversation with a woman I’d like to have met.”

Gieuseppe gave him an approving look; he was a man who enjoyed the sight of a good looking woman, and made no secret of it.

“Mama said she was an Israeli officer … I think Captain, maybe.  She said she was built and built right” – he winked at the grinning Italian – “with everything where it should be and in the right amounts, until she came to her eyes.”

Linn’s voice was quiet as his imagination drew the portrait his mother’s words inspired.

“She said her eyes were like a marble statue’s.

“She said she had no idea what that woman had seen in her lifetime, but she wouldn’t want to get on her wrong side!”

Gieuseppe blinked, considering this, nodded.

“The Israeli handed Mama a Browning Hi-Power and said not to let the others see it, she’d need it back, but just in case, and she’d pulled over a tall, good looking man and did the same with him.  She introduced him – I don’t recall the name – but she told Mama this man was one of the Papal Guard.

“The Israeli woman rode with them, the horses knew their route, and they had a scenic ride, they learned more of the history of the area than she otherwise would have, she enjoyed the daylights out of herself, and she said that Swiss guard was a perfect gentleman.”

“Mi familia,” Gieuseppe murmured happily, then he blinked and remembered:  “Sheriff, you ask-a how far back can I follow mi familia.”

Linn nodded.

“You don’t ask-a for-a no reason.  You thinkin’, I can tell.”  He narrowed his eyes, assessing the lawman with knowing eyes.  “What-a you thinkin’?”

“I’m thinkin’,” Linn said slowly, “I want to backtrack how Old Granddad came here.”

Gieuseppe nodded approvingly. 

Gieuseppe knew about Willamina’s long and thorough study of her ancestry, of her documenting and researching her honored antecedents.

Gieuseppe knew about Willamina’s love for history and for her restoration of the Z&W Railroad, of her unceasing efforts to bring Firelands to the fore as a tourist destination.

Gieuseppe knew she’d spoken extensively of her thrice-great grandfather, Old Pale Eyes himself.

Gieuseppe knew she’d tracked Old Pale Eyes from boyhood in Ohio, through the War, across the country and finally to Firelands.

Gieuseppe had no idea that Linn had been studying that journey.

Gieuseppe had no idea that Linn was mapping the journey.

Gieuseppe had no idea that Linn knew that Old Pale Eyes found gold where no gold should ever be.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

21.  A BOX OF STAINLESS STEEL SCREWS

 

The Sheriff hesitated, then raised his fist and knocked.

The door opened immediately, which did not surprise Linn in the least.

His Uncle Will had been Chief of Police in Firelands, and the man was pretty hard to sneak up on:  Linn suspected he waited for the knock as a formality.

The door opened and pale eyes crinkled up at the corners as another set of pale eyes looked through the screen at him.

Linn’s eyes were not smiling.

He reached up and slowly removed his uniform Stetson.

Of a sudden Uncle Will’s eyes were not smiling anymore.

There is one reason, and only one reason, a lawman will come to the door and remove his cover before he comes inside, and Will felt his belly drop to his boot tops.

Linn saw him swallow, then nod, and he reached for the door handle.

“You’d best come in,” Will said quietly.

The two men sat down at the kitchen table.

Will was a widower now, and by appearances, a fastidious bachelor:  the kitchen was in absolute order, not a single dirty dish or utensil in the sink, the table had a fresh tablecloth, the stove was spotless – it was a working stove, to be sure, but immaculately cleaned, as if scrubbed after every use – the pie he offered was fresh, the crust flaky, the coffee was instant and as good as instant ever is, or isn’t.

Linn waited until the man heated water for two mugs, waited until they both ritually spooned and stirred and added milk, waited until two slices of pie were placed, and the fork laid on the plate with the pie.

The two men sat.

“You know,” Will said thoughtfully, “this is one of the best pies I’ve ever made.  I finally quit beating the dough to death.”

They cut the tip off their wedge of pie, both men ate:  Linn nodded and said, “Uncle Will, don’t ever tell my wife, but she can’t make a flaky crust to save her backside.  Her crusts are tough.  They taste good but they’re tough.”

Will nodded.  “Mine used to be.”  He cut another chunk, slid his fork under the bite.  “I reckon you’ve got bad news.”

Linn nodded. 

“The chief fell over dead this morning.”

“Hayil,” Will said, surprise in his voice:  his bite of pie lowered, untasted.

Linn nodded.

“Come to work, stepped across the threshold and collapsed.  They worked him but he was gone before he hit the floor.  Doc said it was probably a widowmaker clot.”

Will shook his head. 

“Council asked me to approach you about comin’ back.”

Will blinked.

“I’m retired, Linn,” he said slowly, but there was something in the man’s expression, maybe something in his voice, that told the Sheriff his uncle was interested.

“The men have confidence in you, Uncle Will.  Hell, they’d charge … they’d charge Hell with a bucket of water if you’d give the order!”

“No.”  Will shook his head.  “I’d not tell ‘em to do that.”  He looked up and Linn saw amusement in the man’s pale eyes.  “Two buckets, maybe.”

Linn nodded.

Will took a noisy slurp of coffee, frowned.

“You know what this means.”

“What’s that?”

Will grinned crookedly, an old scar forming a V on one cheek as his face drew up in amusement.  “I’ll have to grow my mustache back.”

“She hated that mustache, didn’t she?”

Will shrugged.  “It wasn’t the first thing I slaughtered on the altar of her happiness.”

“You give up paramedic for her.”

“Yep.”

“You give up the fire department too.”

Will nodded, a distant, regretful look in his eyes.

“You retired because of her.”

“Yep.”

“How soon can you start?”

Will considered for a long moment.

“Let’s finish our pie.  I’ll wash the dishes up and change clothes.  Can you give me a ride?”

“Yes, sir, I can do that.”

 

Nicodemus Keller was Will’s nephew.

Nicodemus was also … useful.

Nicodemus was a sponge, but of a variety of unusual subjects: this made him useful as an investigator, for chief among his assets was curiosity.

He was also accomplished at disguise, the calluses on his fingertips betrayed his skill on the guitar, five-string banjo and mountain fiddle:  he was known to sing deliciously naughty songs in certain taverns that appreciated a piano player with a good voice, and on occasion he was known to employ methods that might not be considered altogether … legal.

Effective, yes, but not entirely lawful, fair or above-board, which made him the ideal candidate for the Sheriff’s purpose.

Nicodemus knocked politely at his Uncle Linn’s front door; when Connie opened it, he spun his hand in a quick flourish, produced a bouquet of flowers from nowhere, gave his Stetson a backhand flip which spun it flawlessly onto the hall tree, and he greeted the Sheriff with a cheerful, “Whatever it was, I wasn’t there, nobody saw me and I made a fine profit off the deal!”

Linn laughed and the two shook hands:  Nicodemus tapped his knuckles against the Sheriff’s lean middle and said, “Picking up some weight, are we?  I knew your wife was a terrible cook!” – and with a wink handed the Sheriff back his pocket watch.

“I need your talents,” Linn said without preamble, as was his habit.  “Come take a look at this.”

Linn had a topo map laid out on the kitchen tabletop, other maps were rolled up on the table, a few books were stacked at one corner.

“Here’s modern day Kansas,” Linn said.  “I made a big map from several USGS quadrangles.”
Nicodemus frowned at the map.  “Okaaaaay … what am I looking for?”

“A river.”

Nicodemus raised an eyebrow.

“A … river.”

Linn nodded.

“The river Old Pale Eyes dug that gold out of.”

“The same.”

“He said the locusts swarmed all over that after he found his gold pockets and they stripped it clean.”

“No they didn’t.”  Linn leaned close, his voice quiet, confidential.  “There were two riverbeds.  I think it was a bifurcation, where it split around an upthrust.  I think they cleaned one side but not the other.”

Nicodemus shrugged.  “Gold fever?  Uncle Linn, the stuff will scour every riverbed for a hundred mile radius.”

Linn nodded.  “That is possible,” he agreed, “but I’d like to make sure.”

Nicodemus gave his uncle a skeptical look.

“I’m betting there’s nothing there.”

“I’m betting there is, and right where the old man found the first two pockets.”

“I’d say they blew those pockets open and sifted the sand!”

“I’ve been studying the weather records from back then.”  Linn turned to a laptop, sorted through several files, opened one marked WEATHER, 1880-1890.

“The riverbed he describes was nearly dry.  It was an unusually dry year that exposed those pockets.  As soon as he got out here, the rain picked back up and that section has been immersed ever since.”

Nicodemus began to smile.

“But not this year.”

“If it’s still exposed,” Linn said.  “That part of the river hasn’t shifted with time.  It’s still in the same rocky riverbed.”

Nicodemus nodded slowly.  “Sooooo … what do you want me to do?”

“Old Pale Eyes found gold in pockets big across as a man’s fist and deep as his elbow.”

Nicodemus nodded.

“They didn’t have those electric bilge pumps the water company uses to pump out meter pits.”

“How closely can we … where did he cross the river?”

“Now there’s where you come in.”

“You need young legs to check out a lot of river.”

“How are you at canoeing?”

Nicodemus grinned.

“Forget the canoe,” he chuckled.  “I’ll take my kayak!”

“What I’d thought …”  Linn frowned.  “What I’d thought was you might find those deep, narrow holes, and stick a garden hose pickup line down into ‘em and pump out clear to the very bottom.”

“In a river.”

“In a river.”

“And suppose the game warden comes along and wants to know what I’m doing?”

Linn chuckled. 

“Tell him you’re as tight fisted as your old man, you spilled a box of stainless steel screws and you’re too cheap to go clear back to town and buy another box!”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

22.  HELP WANTED

 

Sheriff Linn Keller read the words and he could almost hear a man’s voice saying them.

“I, Linn Keller, Sheriff of Firelands County, Colorado, do herby attest that the following is a true and accurate account of how I ended up here.”

Sheriff Linn Keller read the words written by a man dead a century and more, the words of a man who’d ridden West as many men had, rode with his few belongings and a broken heart, rode to find what his future might hold.

It was not difficult for this lawman of the modern age to place himself in the saddle of the man in the 1880s.

 

Sam-horse and I left that Kansas farm house at little better than a walk, looking around, a man in no particular hurry to go anywhere, and with no particular place I intended to be.

The widow-woman had made me welcome, and I’d spent time there, I’d fixed her roof and near to fell off it, I fixed the roof over her well, I’d forged out new hinges and re-hung two doors so they fit proper, and a good workmanlike job it was.

She’d come to me that night and I reckon we both needed the other’s comfort, for we found it, as two lonesome souls will, and I left the next day.

I figured to go until someplace felt right.

I knew eventually I’d come to the Big Salt Water and if I come that far, why, I’d have to stop – Sam-horse and I had crossed a sight of ground together and it taken us some years, and I didn’t figger to swim that-there ocean.

Besides, Sam was gettin’ on in his his long-in-the-tooth.

For that matter, so was I.

I felt an awful lot older than my years.

War will do that for a man.

I’d fought in That Damned War and glad I was it was in my past, and I damned that damned War every night, every night when I heard bugles and felt the ground under me vibrate and thunder like that good chestnut mare I rode into battle at a flat-out gallop.

I damned that War every time I woke with my heart a-hammer and my hand tight on the handle of that Navy Colt revolver and my nostrils a-flare and then I’d get back to sleep, sometimes.

The nightmares weren’t near as often now as they were.

Back when I was town Marshal, back in Chauncey, back in the Ohio country, why, I honestly did not give a happy whether I lived or not.

I genuinely did not care.

I walked down the middle of the nighttime street and faced up to Butcherknife Joe and he emptied his pistol at me and I did not care.

I started at that little brick cube of a municipal building and I paced off on the left and ranks of bluecoat ghosts marched with me and I could hear their gear rattle and clink as they strode, their knees rose and fell like waves on a shoreline and they moved with me, their knees raised with mine and as old Joe started to flingin’ pistol balls at me the front rank lowered their bayonets and screamed blood and I never slacked my pace.

I walked up on old Joe as he emptied his pistol and never so much as touched me and I rammed the octagon muzzle of my navy Colt hard up under his wish bone and I blowed a hole clean through him.

Joe hit the ground and I taken his pistol as a prize of battle and I executed a crisp military about-face and I marched myself back to attair brick cube of a building where Council was layin’ bets on whether I was going to come back alive or not.

I walked in on mid-bet and I throwed that tin shield down on their table and said they could go to hell, I was done, draw my pay and I’ll leave tonight.

They didn’t much like it but they knowed I’d just kilt one man and somehow they figgered I might not hesitate to kill some more and they were right.

That night I just did not care.

I moved on West and I was Marshal in a Kansas town that tried to cheat me out of my good wage.

I walked into council meetin’ – it was a mark of the town’s quality that Council met in the saloon, and took full advantage of the entertainment when they did, and got paid for it – the Mayor told me to go away and quit botherin’ him, and then he said he’d take the cost of that last load of stovewood out of my pay.

That’s when I fetched him backwards out of his chair and allowed as he was a-gonna pay me or I would take it out of his hide.

On that moment the fracas became general.

It is not wise to try and cheat a quiet man, it is not wise to try to cheat an honest man, it is not wise a’tall to provoke a patient man, for when you reach that man’s limits you discover just what that man is capable of doing.

Council as a whole came to regret their having severally agreed with the Mayor’s curt dismissal of my claim.

I recall swinging a chair hard and plainly flooring one fellow, I grabbed the table and threw it over, chips and money and a pocket watch slung into the air and I flipped the table hard; it came over and broke another councilman’s nose.

A man reached for a pistol and I reached in and grabbed his wrist and threw him across the room.  I reckon his wrist broke for I felt something snap and he give kind of a whimpering wail as he flew across the hole created by men drawing back out of the way.

The Mayor tried coming up and I kicked him in the forehead, I spun and drove my knuckles into the nearest vest.

One of them got a swing at me with a bottle and it bounced off my shoulder.

I got the bend of my arm up under his crotch and straightened and he come off the floor at least four foot and landed on his back and I turned back to the Mayor.

He’d pulled a shiny little pistol of some kind and I give a roundhouse kick and it went skitterin’ across that varnished-slick floor and I stomped the man in the guts hard enough to knock a week’s worth of wind out of his politician’s paunch, then I turned and caught a fist coming in.

It was the bouncer and I let go of any hold-back I ever had.

I don’t recall what-all I did other than spinning on one heel and swinging my leg behind his knees, I recall after I beat him some I come down with my hand a-forked across his wind pipe and I was fast enough to bang his head against the floor twice, and then I jumped back for I knew the man was fast and strong and good in a fight, and I was right.

He come up in time to get a good look at the business end of an octagon barrel shoved out toward his nose.

He grabbed that barrel and then he froze for he heard the triple-click of a second pistol and he looked down and my left-hand gun was pointed right at his proud-ofs and I said real quiet, “Let go,” and he did.

Now at this point I was kind of warm and I was kind of aggravated and I allowed as I had no quarrel with the bouncer, if he would kindly back up to the bar and have a beer on me I would be very much obliged.

As he was faced with two pistol barrels and both hammers cocked, he saw the wisdom of my suggestion.

I felt my cheek bone start to throb and I knew he’d got a good one on me.

“You can put that shotgun down, barkeep,” I said conversationally, “or more than just you is goin’ to hell tonight.”

The barkeep eased the hammers down on his double twelve and carefully set the scatter back under the bar.

“Draw your bouncer a beer.  He’s earned it.”

I looked around and the unblinking eyes of a pair of Colt’s revolvers looked around with me.

“The Mayor,” I declared loudly, “has cheated me out of my rightful wages and I am here to collect.  Does anyone dispute my claim?”

I looked around and I realized I felt pretty good.

My blood was up, I was breathing easy, I’d just started a fight and I’d put a stop to it, and now I was going to collect what I’d earned.

I looked around, waiting for a dispute; there was none – just that absolute, utter, complete silence that happens when even the piano player fetches his hands off the ivories and holds real, real still.

I eased the hammers down – one, then the other – I holstered, one, then the other.

I knelt, opened the Mayor’s coat, removed the man’s wallet.

As I recall it was nice and fat.

I rose, summoned the bouncer:  “Fetch yourself over here and witness this.”

He came, reluctantly; I motioned him to set the table back up, and he did.

I pulled that fat stack of Yankee greenbacks out of the man’s leather and held it up.

“I could claim all of this,” I said, “but that would be robbery.  I’m after what’s rightly mine.  Barkeep, you’re a businessman.  I want you to cipher up what they owe me.  I’ve not been paid for four months, they owe me that much back wages and as the chief law enforcement officer I am levying them a fine equal to that same amount.”

The barkeep ciphered up an amount, which is what I’d figured up ahead of time.

His figures came to the same dollar as mine.

I counted out the bills on the table top and the bouncer counted with me.

I stuffed the rest of the bills into the wallet and tossed the wallet onto the groaning mayor’s chest.

“I am a peaceful man,” I said, looking around, “and I have done no man wrong. Not before and not now.  If any wishes to dispute this, say so right now.”

No one said a word.

I nodded.

I looked down.

“Mister Mayor,” I said, turning the lapel over on my coat and fetching off the tin shield they’d given me as a badge of office, “I quit.”

I tossed the badge onto his belly and I walked out.

Me and the Mexican rode out that night, him on a good looking mustang and me on my old Sam-horse, and he asked as he always did why didn’t I get myself a real horse.

“Miguel,” I said frankly, “old Sam here has been in the family since I got married and he’s about all I got left of my old life.  I reckon as long as he’s willin’ to haul me around I’ll let him,” and Miguel laughed and allowed as I was a wise man, and as I left that-there Marshal’s office for the very last time, I set a fresh painted sign in the window.

It was my final statement to the Mayor and I knew it would make him mad, which is what I wanted.

Miguel and I looked at that sign as we turned and rode West, out of town, and that fresh painted HELP WANTED watched us leave.

 

Miguel and I parted ways when the trail forked.

I regretted seeing him go for he’d proven a good friend and an honest man, but he had a black eyed senorita south of there, and he was anxious to take the gold he’d earned breaking horses and mending saddles and set up his own estancia.

I wished him the blessing of seven saints and an angel and he laughed and shouted “Vaya con Dios,” and off he galloped.

 

Linn made careful notes of what he read.

His pale eyed namesake was meticulous in his observation of terrain and distance, of time traveled and landmarks:  Linn had a period map of Kansas, and he overlaid this with a sheet of clear plastic and made notations, marked the trail, indicated landmarks, in erasable marker.

Stick-figure ovals with little stubby legs sufficed for the location of the stampeding buffalo herd, where Old Pale Eyes sheltered his aging but capable plow horse between boulders in a draw, while the river of shaggy thunder flowed on across the landscape; he didn’t bother to draw in a snarling cat, mostly because he lacked the cartooning skill:  he frowned, he muttered, he calculated, he approximated, he skipped forward in the journal, then back, and finally, finally the story – and his map --came to that river.

A river in Kansas where no gold should be.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

23.  CRAWDAD HOLE

 

Sam and I come to that what used to be a river.

It was warm, the sun was beatin’ down on us, Sam allowed as he liked it in the shade and I let him graze.

Now I’ve liked creeks since I was a boy and I’ve like watchin’ fish and crawdads and I wondered if Kansas had crawdads like we got back home so I got curious and took a look.

I pulled off boots and socks and hell, I stripped off and there was enough water in a hole to take me a bath, so I got out a cake of soap and lathered up and let the little trickle of a stream carry the suds on downstream away from me.

I got to lookin’ after I renched off and there sure enough was a crawdad.

I tilted my head a little and studied after it and it flipped its tail and scooted backwards and down a hole.

Now that got me curious.

The bottom was rock here, pretty much all of it was except for that pool, and there was enough current I didn’t get no soap in that crawdad hole, and I wondered how deep that might be.

The hole was big around as my fist and no idea how it was made but I eased my hand down in it nice and easy and felt sand in the bottom and I curled up my fingers and scooped that-there crawdad out and it warn’t happy, after it pinched at me – it was just a little thing, couldn’t really hurt me – why, I looked at them sand grains I brought up, and I froze.

Sand might be a little shiny but these was real shiny.

I looked at my hand, still in the water, and it was glittery with what looked for all the world like gold dust, little flakes, shiny, pretty, the color of dreams and greed.

I blinked and shook my hand to get them all off my hand before I pulled it out of the water.

I looked over at Sam-horse, figuring if anyone was near he’d hear ‘em or smell ‘em before I would.

Sam looked back at me, then went back to grazin’.

Now Kansas is flat and a man can see a long way, and I knew better than to let the terrain fool me:  I come out of the water and dried off and got back into my socks and boots and I started scoutin’.

I made me a big circle and found all the places someone could spy on me or sneak up on me or lay ambush, and I set down in the shade and laid that Spencer carbine acrost my lap and did some hard thinkin’.

I had no idea a’tall how deep that hole was. 

For all I knew there was barely enough dust in there to color up under a man’s fingernails.

Still …

By evening I’d brought out a good pound of dust and nuggets.

I know gold is heavier than sand and I figure it got swirled in that-there hole and maybe in flood time there was enough of a water-spin it slung out the sand and held the heavier gold – or maybe it grew there, hell, I didn’t know.

All I knew was I sewed me up two leather tubes and I filled one with dust.

It was long as my forearm and as big around and heavy as a sinner’s conscience.

I sewed it tight with a lapped over seam and I waxed it good and heavy and I didn’t want no dust to leak out and betray the contents.

I filled a second one just as full.

Now that sounds easy when you say it fast, but there was scoopin’ out, there was dryin’ out, there was shaking real careful into the leather tube, and there was a hell of a lot of lookin’ around.

I was careful to sweep the gold dust back into the hole, underwater like it was, and I stirred mud enough to hide the contents.

I marked the place for that was not the only hole and I run my arm down two of the three others and they all had gold too.

I set them leather tubes of heavy gold in my saddle bags and did some more thinkin’.

I think good when I ride and as I’d washed my duds and let ‘em dry good in the sun, and I’d washed me as well, why, me and Sam started out ag’in.

I rode up stream for a distance, staying in the water, I made double damn sure nobody could tell where I’d been busy, I even flipped Sam’s road apples into the moving water and blurred his tracks as best I could, what few there were.  It would not fool a tracker but your average man wouldn’t make heads nor tails out of it.

We headed north this time, north away from the river, we got an hour’s ride at a fast walk and damn if we didn’t run into a shifty lookin’ fella headed the other way.

I been a lawman long enough I knew a fellow that wasn’t trust worthy when I saw him, and he saw somethin’ about me he didn’t like.

He didn’t waste time.

“What’s in them saddlebags?”  he demanded.

“Gold,” I said bluntly.  “Ten pound of dust and nuggets.”

“Yeah?”  he  sneered.  “Let’s see ‘em.”

I grinned.  “You like gold, don’t you?”

He moved for his pistol and I shot him out of his saddle:  he saw my revolver behind my belt, right under my belly button.

He never saw my left hand Colt.

Now I’m told I’m fast and I’ve known faster but I ain’t no slouch and that day it was my salvation.

Sam-horse, he didn’t object none to me shootin’ out of the saddle, long as I wasn’t shootin’ over his head or near to his ears, and this fellow was to my left and only a little ahead.

I didn’t take his horse but I did unsaddle it and peel off its bridle.

If it was stolen, it might find its way home, and if it was stolen I wanted no part of it:  horse thieves are commonly hung and gettin’ my neck stretched would just ruin my vacation plans.

I was lucky enough in a day or three to run into a town, and some judicious inquiry proved fortuitous:  the fellow who run the bank was a brother Mason, and after exchanging various bona fides, I asked him if he might do me a favor.

He was suspicious until I hauled one of them gold filled sausage tubes out from inside my coat and thumped down on his desk.

“I need this turned into credit,” I said, “and deposited in a particular bank back East where I hold accounts.”

I recall when he weighed out the dust it seemed like that long rawhide tube just kept a-pourin’ and a-pourin’ and a-pourin’, and the sum he named was staggering.

I taken some as coin, for spending money is a handy thing to have, but the most of it went back to Ohio, to the Citizens’ Bank in Glouster, with instructions to another brother Mason, a man of my acquaintance who long ago had well earned my trust:  he was to purchase controlling interest in the Z&W Railroad, the Zanesville & Wheeling, locally known as the Zig Zag and Wobble.  I had every confidence it would be done.

Before I left, I had this Kansas banker send out for a lead rod.

I dumped out the last of the gold dust, slid in that rod, then poured dust in around it.

If I was to be robbed, I told the man, let them steal the decoy.

I did not tell  him I had a second tube the size of the first, just as full of dust and nuggets.

A brother Mason he was, but I learned the hard way not to trust … too much.

 

Linn shivered a little as he re-read the account.

He sharpened his pencil and calculated, he laid out the map and plotted the man’s probable course, he looked at satellite views of the river, and finally he gave his nephew a call.

It was time to dispatch his trusted assistant.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

24.  THE WAGES OF SIN

 

Sheriff Linn Keller normally sat near the front.

He was a man who wished to hear what the Parson had to say.

More often than not, he was leaned forward, one or both elbows on his knees, fingertips steepled under his nose, frowning a little, obviously listening closely to the message:  the Parson, in turn, was encouraged that at least one of his congregation was actually paying attention.

Linn trod the aisle as he always did, with his hand on his wife’s elbow, and their infant son in his wife’s arms:  he seated his bride, whispered something in her ear.

She looked at him, surprised, but nodded; he went to the rear of the nearly filled church, smiling, shaking hands, exchanging quiet-voiced greetings:  few noticed as the Sheriff practiced a gift of turning invisible – which he didn’t, really, but he could ease up beside a group of parishioners, or a row of hanging coats, and by virtue of turning just a little and holding very still, he was suddenly almost unnoticeable.

The organ began to play, the congregation rose, the Sheriff drifted like a shadow toward the doorway that led downstairs, down to the children’s church, the section some wise wag called the “Infantry” – the previous Parson liked the idea well enough he had the word painted on a shingle and hung it over the doorway.

The Sheriff never failed to smile a little whenever he saw it.

Any town will have its transients; any town will have new faces.

Firelands was no different.

The Sheriff cultivated contacts at every social strata; he was as comfortable with the poorest of the residents as the most prosperous, and he had the ability to put anyone, no matter who, feel at ease in his presence.

For that reason he knew there was talk, and he listened to talk, and he remembered the advice of an old veteran lawman.

When Linn first hung a tin star on his shirt pocket, an old veteran of the craft laid a fatherly hand on his shoulder and counselled, “Son, when in doubt, follow your gut.”

Linn’s gut told him don’t sit in the front.

Wait in the rear, and watch.

He didn’t have long to wait.

He was back far enough, a vertical form among vertical forms, what the military called his “Visual Signature” broken and blurred by hanging garments and structural elements:  when furtive eyes looked into the doorway, they saw nothing, and the Sheriff noted the ushers at the back of the aisle – but even with the back row of pews – unable to see a pair of sneakers slither under the rearmost pew.

The sneakers were attached to a newcomer, the newcomer emerged with a fold of bills and gleaming, smooth plastic rectangles – credit cards – and the Sheriff powered out of the shadowing doorway, accelerating beyond step, through stride and directly into sprint.

The teen looked up and his pupils dilated as he saw a long tall lawman was heading for him and moving fast: he turned, got two steps, when something fast, solid and hard hit him in the small of the back and he went down face first onto the hardwood floor.

All this occurred as the organ and the Parson led the assembled in the opening hymn; the sudden commotion at the rear of the church, however, the quick but brief staccato of a running man, the sound of a human body slamming into the floor and a pained grunt, a yell – “Get off me, HELP!” – followed by another pained gasp as the Sheriff came off the floor and dropped his weight through the spear of his knees, into the thief’s kidneys, detonating an absolute sunball of pain that utterly immobilized the prisoner.

The organ kind of coasted to an uncertain stop, heads turned, voices stilled, so quickly and so completely that the snarl of stainless-steel teeth was loud and brittle as the Sheriff’s cuffs tightened quickly and mercilessly around felonious wrists.

The Sheriff gathered the purloined credit cards, the scattered bills:  “Just lay still,” he said in a surprisingly fatherly voice.

After a grown man came down in such a crushing manner, after the pain he’d just felt, the young thief had no problem with doing just that:  he was having enough trouble fighting a little air, and a little more, into his desperate, air-starved lungs.

“Mrs. Hueston,” Linn said, reading one of the cards, then another:  “Mrs. McGillicutty.”  He frowned.  “I’m afraid I’ll have to hold these as evidence, ladies, but they will be returned to you after we resolve this case.  Everyone else, check what valuables you left on the floor, this snake just slithered under your collective backsides and helped himself to at least two purses.”

The Sheriff raised his chin a little, met the Parson’s eyes.

“Parson, I don’t know what you’d planned to preach on, but the wages of sin come to mind” – he reached down, seized the thief’s upper arms, hauled him upright – “or maybe the Ten Commandments, with special attention to that part about thou shalt not steal.”

He flipped the cuffed prisoner around, seized him by the shirt front, left handed, and hauled him off the floor.

The pale-eyed Sheriff lifted the prisoner’s feet free of the deck, then brought him up to eye level and held him for a moment, then he pressed him – one-arm press – to full extension overhead, raised him to elbow lock, brought him down slow.

He brought him down to eye level again and bored cold, pale eyes into the thief’s wide and frightened orbs.

“You have the right to remain silent,” the Sheriff said quietly.  “If you give up the right to remain silent I will use every last thing you say against you just as thoroughly as I possibly can.  You have the right to an attorney and the county will spend good money on a public defender if you can’t afford one of your own.  Whether you understand these rights is immaterial as we have a whole bunch of people here to witness that you have been told your rights.” 

The Sheriff’s face was pale, the bones of his face stood out under tight-stretched skin.

“I hate few things,” the Sheriff whispered, “but I hate a thief most of all.”  He looked past the dangling prisoner, nodded:  the usher opened the door and the Sheriff strode easily for the open portal.

He carried the prisoner across the street, left-handed, as easily as he would carry a very young child.

 

Nicodemus Brunton knew he had his uncle’s full financial backing in this effort.

His uncle was convinced there was gold to be had, and he was positive he had information that would lead his dutiful nephew to this treasure.

Nicodemus frankly didn’t think he would find anything but wet feet and mud:  still, he was willing to look.

If his uncle was right, and there was gold in that ancient and mostly dry riverbed, all well and good:  if there was no gold, in spite of his best efforts, he would at least spend some time earning a wage.

Work was not easy to come by; he was, by nature, lazy, but if he enjoyed what he did, he was vigorous:  he’d found to his delight that he could disguise himself, he could become someone else, and this was at once interesting, and … well, frankly, it was fun.

Nicodemus took a room in a down-at-heels motel, he paid cash and paid for two weeks’ stay, his rental car was parked outside, and with the help of a bored clerk, he managed to get directions to a canoe rental.

He dressed like a tourist:  he gawked, he was awkward, he mounted a rack on the rental and secured a rented kayak, and he went to scout the river.

Uncle Linn, he thought, I’m here, and I’m staying less than a mile from the river.  I’m going to take a look at it tonight.

He smiled crookedly as the little car crunched steadily down the gravel road to the river.

As if I’ll remember to put that into an e-mail.

 

Linn’s fingers crawled quickly, surely over the keyboard:  he filled out the form as he’d done any number of times before, processing the prisoner into the system.

The accused was just over eighteen, and therefore an adult in the eyes of the law:  he’d be taken in front of the Judge in the morning, and in the meantime, the public defender was now speaking with the prisoner.

Sheriff Keller had no way of knowing one of his deputies was diving across the lobby at that moment, colliding with the prisoner and rolling in a tangled mass of flailing limbs and clawing hands against the wall.

As a matter of fact, he was concentrating so completely on the screen in front of him that it wasn’t until there was a flash and a sudden, ear-slapping concussion that he realized there was a serious problem.

Linn fairly launched out of his seat, stretching to seize the double gun from the rack overhead:  his long thumb swung around, wiping the hammers back to full stand, he jerked the door open, thrust the gun muzzles forward:  he rose, advanced, shotgun on the prisoner.

The deputy lay unmoving.

Cindy’s eyes were wide, the size of boiled eggs and just as white around the edges.

The prisoner’s hands were wrapped around the deputy’s pistol and he was hauling so desperately at the holstered sidearm he had the deputy’s limp body off the floor.

The Sheriff brought the double gun slowly to shoulder, his ice-blue eye settling at the rear of the rib, two tubes of double-ought death taking a cold, unblinking look at the prisoner.

The accused screamed in frustration, jerked frantically, trying desperately to part handgun from security sheath.

The Sheriff’s finger curled around the front trigger, caressed the smooth curve of polished steel.

The prisoner released his grip, threw both arms up in the air, turned to face the long, lean lawman, went to his knees, dropped his head, defeated.

“Face down,” the Sheriff said quietly.  “On the floor.  Cindy.”

The dispatcher’s face was the color of wheat paste.

“Cindy, who fired the shot?”

“I did,” she said in a tiny voice.  “I think I killed him.”

The Sheriff felt the old, familiar Rage building inside him:  it was a curse he inherited, it was an overpowering nerve-storm he’d fought all his life, and it came roaring up from the depths of his loins like a Texas tornado.

A very, very angry Texas tornado.

He took a moment, he took a long breath, then he spoke again, and his voice was no longer quiet, it was not gentle, but as it climbed to a full-voiced shout, it was still as full of menace as a shoebox of rattlesnakes.

“If my deputy is dead,” he said, “he will stand before Odin the One-Eyed with HIS BOOT ON YOUR THROAT!”

The prisoner tasted ashes.

The front door opened and a familiar figure stepped into the lobby.

“Uncle Will,” Linn said.

“Sheriff.”

“I should have said ‘Good morning, Chief.’”

“Call me anything but late for supper.”  He frowned at the awkwardly-piled-up deputy, at the proned-out prisoner.  “Is there somethin’ I should know?”

“Chief, could you kindly cuff this prisoner before I blow his eternal soul to hell?”

Chief Will Keller nodded and Linn brought the double gun up to port arms.

Will shook his head.  “You and your Mama,” he muttered as he spun a set of irons from its black-leather pouch under his left kidney.  “Don’t move, son, I ain’t killed no one in two weeks’ time and I’m getting’ cranky for the lack!”

 

Connie Keller looked up as the tones dropped.

Her heart dropped as well as she heard the dispatcher’s voice – uncharacteristically shaky – her words were as alarming as her tone of voice.

“Firelands Fire Department, two men down, Sheriff’s office.”

Connie ran across the living room and snatched baby and baby carrier from the floor, and  her purse from the stand where she kept it.

She’d locked the door and ran down the steps, she hit the remote unlock on her Jeep and seized the door handle, fighting the panic that threatened to buckle her knees out from under her.

She swung the baby carrier in place, buckled it in, slammed the door:  she ran around the Jeep, awkwardly, clumsily, her imagination racing.

Two men down.

At the Sheriff’s office.

She climbed behind the wheel, fought the key into the slot.

She slammed the Jeep door shut and twisted the ignition into life.

She pulled the seat belt across her and thrust the tongue viciously into the buckle.

She could not hear the phone ringing inside the house.

 

Linn rested his hands on Cindy’s shivering shoulders.

“You didn’t shoot anyone,” he said quietly.  “I can patch the wall, you stopped the prisoner from escaping, you did fine, Cindy.”  He pulled the trembling dispatcher into him, wrapped his arms around her, rocked her a little.  “You’re fine, Cindy, you did nothing wrong.”

Cindy gave a little quavery squeak and sniffed, and Linn pulled a hankie from his hip pocket and snapped it viciously, once, popping it like he’d pop a tiny whip:  he thrust it into Cindy’s hand, and pretended not to notice as she wiped her eyes and blew her nose with an absolute lack of feminine delicacy.

“I thought I killed him,” she squeaked.

“No, dear heart,” Linn soothed.  “He might have a concussion but that’s not your doing.”  He smiled.  “Besides, you almost shot the bad guy.  The medics said he’s got a red streak across his belly.  I’d say you burned him.”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

25.  COLOR

 

Nicodemus Brunton looked like … well, he looked like he wasn’t from around there.

A loose shirt, shorts, barefoot deck shoes, the kayak, a mop of a haircut … he looked like some college boy on holiday.

A college boy who plugged his tablet into the rental car’s black box and disabled the tracker, using a program his late Aunt Willamina gave him, along with a few tools useful to the investigator.

He’d disabled the GPS in another county from where he expected to be working; he did not wish to leave a trail of electronic bread crumbs with which to be tracked.

His cell phone was in a foil lined sleeve, battery out, in a zip lock baggie:  the battery was in a separate bag, and the two sub-assemblies were in a third:  not only would his cell phone not be pinged, it would not be destroyed if it took an unexpected dip in the river, or what was left of the river.

He followed his uncle’s map and overlay, and came to a place that at least appeared to match the description in his reprinted copy of the Old Sheriff’s Journal.

Nicodemus was as circumspect as his pale eyed ancestor a century and a quarter before:  he used binoculars to sweep the field, glassing anywhere an observer could be watching:  satisfied, he finally offloaded the lightweight kayak, placed it down by the river, knowing there was barely enough water to float it; he scouted around, and to his surprise, he actually found three holes, big as his fist, with a trickle of water sheeting over the rock, and over the holes, and on down into a little pool.

Nicodemus sauntered back to the rental, loafed against the trunk, opened a write-when-wet notebook and began sketching.

He was a fair hand with a pencil, and he sketched flowers in bloom, he sketched a distant fence with the fenceposts awry, he sketched a curious wren that stopped and looked at him and flicked its tail before flying off:  if anyone stopped, he wanted them to think he was either a researcher, or perhaps a biologist – but he wanted an observer to think he was anything other than what he was.

After maybe fifteen minutes, he stretched, opened the trunk, took out a web harness:  he put it on, grunted at the weight of the deep cycle gel cell battery at the small of his back:  he plugged in the twelve volt pump, attached suction and discharge lines, took two five gallon buckets out of the trunk, went down to the riverbank.

“Old Grampa,” he said aloud, “you didn’t say which of these three you mined out, but I’m bettin’ you were a right handed man and you cleaned out the right hole first.”

He dipped a bucket full of water, stuck the discharge hose in the other bucket:  suction line went into the hole, he pressed the button, and the centrifugal pump’s flexible rubber impeller began to whine.

Nicodemus lifted the suction line a little, then lowered it, dumped water in to replace what was being pumped out.

He ran three bucket-dips of water through the right hand hole, then he swirled the catch bucket, poured off most of the excess, reached in, stirred what was left.

He felt his stomach tighten and his jaw dropped about a foot.

He saw color.

 

“Make yourself to home,” Linn said to his uncle Will: “and thank you for taking over the investigation.  If you investigate what happened rather than me, there will be no appearance of cover up.”

Will nodded gravely.  “It does well to be cautious,” he said slowly, the way he always did – the older he got, the slower and more deliberately he spoke, which gave him the appearance of both wisdom, and consideration.

“You’ve been here often enough you know where everything is.  Conference room is yours, anything else you want is yours, coffee is here.”

“You didn’t make the coffee, did you?”  Will rumbled, an amused expression gleaming from behind his eyes.

Linn raised a finger, pressed it against his lower eyelid, drew it down.   “Uncle Will,” he said, “what you see here is ugly, not stupid!”

“You buyin’ the feed?  ‘Cause right about now I’ve got me an appetite!”

“Yep,” Linn nodded, smiling a little.  “I’m buyin’.”

“Good.  I’ll need Cindy and a box of doughnuts.  Cindy, dear heart, what kind of doughnuts you like?”

Cindy shook her head. 

“Chief, if you get doughnuts, get a roll of duck tape.  I’ll just tape ‘em to my bottom, that’s where they’ll end up anyway!”

“Your pants will fit funny.”

“Yeah, but the dog will finally play with me!”

Will looked at the Sheriff, nodded approvingly.  “She’s been exposed to you too long.”

 

“There’s that rental car.”

“What’s that fella doin’?”
Binoculars swung over to the young man in the river.

“Looks like he’s pumpin’ water into buckets.”

“Pumpin’ water.”

“Yeah, he’ll pump a little an’ he writes stuff down, he … looks like he dipped up somethin’ in a baggie.”

“Must be one of them biologist fellers.”

“Nah. Looks like a college boy.”

The binoculars lowered and the two looked at one another.

“College boys got credit cards.”

“That they do.”

“We’ll drag that rental car back to town an’ he’ll be happy to pay the impound fee.”

His companion smiled, and it was not particularly pleasant expression.

“They always do.”

 

Nicodemus pumped out the second hole, dumped out the excess water, pumped it out again, worked the stiff rubber pickup line until he was satisfied he’d gotten as much as could be removed.

He let the second bucket settle and dumped off the water, and he pumped out the third.

Now both buckets contained the rich sediment, the gold-bearing sediment, that used to live in those holes in the rock.

He’d had to tear down the impeller a dozen times – an easy process, pull the side plate, grab the offending gold nugget with needle nose pliers and pull it out, then screw the plate back down – but he’d cleaned the last hole as well.

He struggled back up the bank with the two buckets and just got them secured in the trunk, lids snapped down tight, and he’d gone back down for the kayak when he heard the sound of an approaching truck.

He came over the crest just as the wrecker was backing up to his rental.

The pair were in a hurry, they began lowering the wrecker’s hook.

Nicodemus set down the kayak.  “That’s far enough,” he declared, and the pair looked at him and laughed.

“The rental company said you defaulted,” one sneered, “you’ll have to pay towing and impound fees to get ‘er back!”

His sneer disappeared when the college boy reached into the kayak and came out with a short, black, cut-down shotgun.

The sound of a twelve-gauge pump slamming into battery makes an excellent hearing aid.

“You will do as I say,” Nicodemus said coldly, “or your burnt bodies will be found in your burnt out truck.”

“You –“  one blurted – “that thing ain’t legal!”

“It’s pointed at your belt buckle, what difference does it make?”  Nicodemus stalked a few steps closer, his jaw set.  “Now you’ll do as I say or I’ll cut your legs out from under the both of you and throw you inside your truck’s cab and I’ll burn you both alive.  I’ve done it before!”

The pair looked at one another and swallowed.

All of a sudden their money-making scheme just wasn’t working out.

 

“Sheriff’s Office,” Linn said into the telephone.

Cindy was in the interview room with his Uncle, the police chief, and he hadn’t appointed an adjutant to staff the commo, so when the phone rang, he answered it.

“Uncle Linn,” Nicodemus said, his words clipped, “you best get the jurisdictional sheriff on the horn.”

“Talk to me.”

“I’ve got two fellows hanging from a wrecker hook and I had to badge ‘em.”

Sheriff Linn Keller’s eyes went hard and pale.

“Give me your location.”

 

 The man frowned, annoyed, as the intercom buzzed.

“Lacrois.”

“Sheriff, an urgent call from Sheriff Keller, Firelands County, Colorado.”

“I’ll take it.”  He raised a hand to indicate the room was to remain quiet and pressed the speakerphone button.  “Sheriff Lacrois.”

“Sheriff Lacrois, this is Sheriff Keller, Firelands County.”

Lacrois’ smile was broad and genuine.  “Good afternoon, and how’s the weather in the high country?”

“Bright and sunny and I’m told the fly fishing is good today.  Say, reason I’m calling, it’s polite to let you know when we have someone working in your territory.”

“What’s going on?”

“It’s nothing official …”  The caller’s voice hesitated, and Lacrois looked at the voice-stress detector:  it showed increasing stress, and his eyebrow went up.

A lawman is used to being lied to; Lacrois had the voice-stress analyzer installed for that reason.

“Go on,” he said neutrally.

“Sheriff, my nephew is an investigator and he’s working the river not far from you.  He is recovering some … material.”

“What kind of material?”  Lacrois asked, suspicious.

The caller’s voice hesitated, then continued ruefully, “Sheriff, did you ever mistake yourself for an eighteen-year-old?”

Lacrois blinked and smiled a little in spite of himself.  “Not lately.”

“You’re a cartoonist.”

“Yeah, a little.”

Lacrois looked around at his listening deputies as the voice on the other end chuckled.  “I liked that one you drew in the last regional bulletin.  The one with the two MPs?”

Lacrois laughed a little.  “Everyone that’s prior military likes that one! You’re a Marine, aren’t you?”

“So was my Mama.”

“She taught me to shoot,” a feminine voice added.

“My daughter Marcia,” Lacroix explained.  “Now what’s this about a recovery operation?”

Linn was on speaker as well, and even though their conversation was over the phone and there was no visual, he still threw his hands wide as he declared in a nasal voice “Well, ya see, it’s like this!”

He took a breath, sighed, and said “Sheriff, here’s the cartoon.  You’ve got an older man in a canoe and his wife’s in the back asking if he can really paddle this thing and I told her yes, this will float on a heavy dew and how hard can it be.  Draw a fishing pole out one side and give the woman a skeptical look.”

“Uh-oh,” Lacrois grunted.

“Uh-oh is right.  Now in the next panel of your cartoon, show the canoe just gone over with everything dumping out, including the woman, just her feet sticking out, and the man the same.”

“You didn’t!”

“Third panel, she’s standing belt deep in water, she’s soaked, her hair is plastered down and over her face, her arms are crossed and she’s giving me THAT LOOK!”

Lacrois threw his head back and laughed, and most of his deputies grinned:  his daughter, too, was amused, pressing the back of her hand against her lips to keep from interrupting.

“I lost a good high grade fishing reel and a talkie, my wife never did find her cell phone, chances are the electronics are dead, but she’s still short her wallet and I sent my nephew to try and find ‘em.”

“You couldn’t locate them?”

“Wellll …”

The rueful tone of Sheriff Keller’s voice gave Lacrois his answer.  “It’s kind of hard to fish around on the bottom when the wife is beatin’ you about the head and shoulders with a canoe paddle!”

Lacrois nodded sympathetically. 

“Sheriff,” he admitted, “I’ve been thrown from a canoe myself.  How can we help?”

There was a tap on Sheriff Lacrois’ door:  a deputy stepped in with a note, handed it to his boss.

“Sheriff Keller, let me call you back.  It seems your nephew is asking for help right now.”

 

When Lacrois’ two cruisers arrived and four deputies swarmed out, Nicodemus Brunton was leaning against the trunk of his rental car, badge in hand, his abbreviated pump gun on the trunk behind him:  the would-be extortionists were in handcuffs, not quite hanging from the ends of the wrecker’s hook bar, but they were standing very tall to try and take the pressure off their wrists.

“Morning, fellas,” Nicodemus greeted them.  “I’d like to press charges.”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

26.  RAILROADED

 

In the fullness of time, Old Pale Eyes married a woman with red hair and green eyes, a woman of iron will but velvet touch, a woman of beauty and culture, a woman of the Old South who came West to ensure her niece was well.

Esther Wales knew the lean, pale eyed lawman was the man for her:  a woman knows, when she sees the right man, and though there was competition for this lean-waisted prize, she succeeded in letting him think it was all his idea.

She had no idea he’d present her with a ring, and even less that it would be on bended knee, in front of God and everybody – and on the little stage in the Silver Jewel, no less!

A woman delights in being publicly awarded:  had he given her the Promise Ring, as he called it, behind closed doors or even under the starry-decked firmament on a mountainside, with only their horses to witness, that would have been fine:  but to present her with a fine and valuable gemstone, well set in a fine gold ring, sized to fit her perfectly – her face flamed with pleasure, and she could be forgiven if this was mistaken for a degree of embarrassment.

Women are good at detecting lies, falsehoods, conspiracies:  women are good at figuring out things their men would as soon keep secret, hidden, concealed.

She had no idea at all that her husband-to-be was working very hard to keep a secret from her.

Old Pale Eyes, as he was becoming known, leaned against the porch post in front of the little log fortress that was the Sheriff’s office, his shoulder firm against a convenient flat surface as he opened the letter from a bank back East.

He removed the tri-folded sheet, opened it, read:  he read it again, nodded, his face expressionless.

He raised his head, looked around; pale eyes swept the street like an infantryman, quartering the vista, scanning from near to far, lingering where an ambush might be hidden:  his face never changed expression as he turned, slowly coming off the porch post, turning slowly.

He thrust the letter into an inside coat pocket; he reached for his Cannoball-mare’s reins, wrapped once, loosely, around the hitch rail:  as she commonly did, she pulled her head, hauled the reins free, then ducked her head and looked at him as if to say “Look what I did!”

He swung up into the saddle, reins in hand:  he hadn’t had time enough yet to train the mare to ride without a bit, but he would:  he’d had a good chestnut back during that damned War, and he’d ridden into battle with pistol in one hand and curved, sharpened saber in the other, he’d ridden into the swarming confusion of battle, he’d guided the mare without reins and made it look easy.

Try as he might, he could never teach his big Sam-horse:  to the day of his untimely demise, old Sam had to have a bit to be guided well.

Linn walked his red Cannonball mare across the street and down a little, to the bank:  he dismounted, dropped the reins over the hitch rail, not bothering to make the usual single turn.

He reached for the front door when it came quickly open and the manager gave him a surprised look.

“Why Sheriff!”  Beatrice exclaimed.  “I was just coming to see you!”

The Sheriff smiled a little.  “You got it.”

“Yes, I certainly did!”  she exclaimed. 

“Good.”  He nodded.  “I have a railroad to buy.”

Beatrice turned her head a little as if to look at their local railroad’s depot building.

“You’re not …?”

“I am.”  He smiled a tight, secretive smile.  “And I know just the individual to turn a profit with that railroad, too!”

Beatrice gave the Sheriff a long look.  “You … are really going to buy that little run down railroad.”

Linn nodded.  “Yiieeep,” he drawled.

Beatrice shook her head and raised her hands.  “Sheriff,” she said, “I don’t mean to pry, but … that railroad is bankrupt, it’s ready to go under –“

He gave her a look and her eyes widened.

“You know something.”

“Beatrice,” Linn said quietly, “I am a tight fisted man and I am a logical man and I am not given to fancy or great imagination and I am sure as hell not going to put money into something that will lose money.”

“You do know something!”

“Yes I do,” he said.  “I know I am giving my wife a railroad for a wedding gift, and I know beyond any doubt a’tall she’s going to turn a profit, and right soon!”

“You’re just in time, then,” Beatrice sighed.  “The owner ran up the white flag this morning.  He’s officially broke.”

Linn nodded.  “Where is he now?”

“He just walked into Attorney Moulton’s office.”

Linn nodded, touched his hat brim.  “Back shortly.”

 

A little better than a century later, a set of pale eyes re-read Old Pale Eyes’ journal entry, detailing how he acquired the Firelands short line, a failing enterprise from the day it was started, and how – with Esther Keller’s delicately gloved hand at its helm – what was now named the Z&W Railroad began turning a profit.

Linn read how his honored ancestress went to the gold mine and showed them, with columns of figures, with engineers’ statements, with construction estimates, how they were money well ahead to ship ore via her railroad, rather than tear down the refinery from the old, played out gold works to their new, main drift complex.

“Now then, Granddad,” Linn said quietly, “gold was a going concern in your day.  How do I go about turning my gold into cash?”

He chuckled quietly.

“What am I going to do … buy another railroad?”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

27.  THIS IS NO DRILL

 

For a man who’d looked most convincingly like a prosperous, indolent, rich-man’s-son of a college boy, Nicodemus looked surprisingly professional in a tailored suit and emerald-green necktie when he stepped into the Sheriff’s sanctum.

Linn looked up, thrust his chin toward a chair, turned his attention back to the screen:  he frowned a little, the way he always did when he was concentrating, and finally he leaned a little closer to the screen, re-read its contents, nodded once and raised his hands from the keyboard.

He ceremonially, deliberately, pressed the button that sent his communication:  he leaned back from the desk, opened and closed his hands, working the stiff out of his fingers.

“I’ve been laying new flooring in the front bedroom,” he explained, “and I hadn’t counted on having to cut the tongues off the end of the boards up against the wall.”

Nicodemus raised a curious eyebrow and Linn drew thumb and forefinger together.

“I have a consistent one inch gap – which is what I wanted – but to drop in the one inch strip before I nail down the quarter-round, I have to cut off the tongues.”

“What are you using?”

“A miter saw.”

“A …?”

“Think of a short rectangular handsaw.”

“Ah.”  Nicodemus nodded.  “Ya lo creo.  I’m sorry, I’m a little slow today.”

“How was court?”

Nicodemus shrugged.  “We won.”

“They were happy to get the pair.”

“The pair that had been towing and extorting tourists for two years and only now had a credible witness who was willing to come back to town?”  Nicodemus chuckled.  “They were asked on the stand how they felt when they discovered their latest victim was a Sheriff’s detective.”

“I told you that police commission would come in handy.”

Nicodemus nodded, leaning forward, rubbing his palms slowly together.

“That suit fits you well.  Factory, or did Mama make that one for you?”

“Factory.  I didn’t want to look too good for court today.”  He shifted in his seat.  “Speaking of looking good, I must really compliment you on your firefighters’ uniforms.”

Linn frowned a little, turning his head slightly to the side.  “Eh?”

Nicodemus hooked a thumb over his shoulder.  “Aunt Willa would have loved it,” he grinned.  “They were coming up the street with a three-horse hitch and that steam engine smoking behind them and every man Jack of them wearing those red wool bib front shirts with the gold Maltese cross in the front –“

Nicodemus stopped as he saw his uncle’s eyes go dead pale, and his pupils expand:  nephew leaned away a little as uncle powered out of his chair and hauled the door open, strode toward the dispatcher’s desk.

“Cindy!”  he snapped.  “Blow the whistle!”

“I … what?”  Cindy asked, confused.

Linn stopped, took a long breath, both hands fisted:  Nicodemus came out of the office, paced silently up behind his Uncle, noted the tight, clenched fists and the slight tremor in the man’s voice.

“Cindy –“  Linn leaned over her, seized the computer mouse, went to a screen kept constantly on standby:  he ran through a half-dozen files, click, clicked again.

In the Firelands firehouse, every one of today’s Irish Brigade froze as the loud and metallic gong, gong, gong, gong of a US Navy general quarters alarm sounded:  these tones also came over the speaker in the town’s police station, and at the main desk of the Firelands hospital.

The Sheriff hit the white-plastic key on the angular desk mike, hit it hard, as hard as his voice:  “NOW HEAR THIS, ALL HANDS NOW HEAR THIS, DISASTER PROTOCOL IS IN EFFECT, DISASTER PROTOCOL IS IN EFFECT.  ALL HANDS, BATTLE STATIONS, THIS IS NOT A DRILL!”

He reached for a switch half-hidden under a shelf, pressed the black-plastic button firmly, held it for three seconds, until he heard the reconditioned WWII air raid siren begin to gather itself, screaming alarm from the steel tower thrust like a cross-braced oil derrick above the firehouse.

Nicodemus reached inside his coat, touched the grip of his pistol in its shoulder holster:  suddenly he wasn’t quite as confident in it, so he stepped back into the Sheriff’s sanctum.

The pale eyed lawman turned and long-stepped it back into his office and accepted the shotgun thrust at him by his nephew.

Two tall men with riot guns slung from their off shoulder strode for the front door, jaws set and faces taut, not knowing what was going on, but duly warned by a ghostly harbinger, they were going to be ready for whatever it was.

The Sheriff and his detective climbed into the marked Suburban, fired up the engine, rolled down their windows.

“Exactly where did you see the steam machine?”  the Sheriff asked.

Uncomfortable, Nicodemus turned in his seat, pointed.  “It was coming up hill from the firehouse.”

“How clearly did you see it?”

“How clearly?”  Nicodemus stared at his uncle.  “What do you mean, how clearly?  It wasn’t twenty yards from me!”

“What did it sound like?”

“What …”

Nicodemus’ voice coasted to a stop and his mouth opened, the he looked at his uncle, alarmed.

“It was silent,” he almost whispered.

Just then they heard the explosion.

 

The Captain strode across the brick floor of the equipment bay at the top of his lungs.

“ALL HANDS ON DECK!  NO IRISH NEED APPLY!  TURN TO, DAMN YOU, OR I’LL HAVE YOUR GUTS FOR GARTERS!  EMPTY THE HOUSE, EMPTY THE WHOLE DAMNED HOUSE, GET EVERYTHING OUT!!!”

Men seized boots, thrust sock feet into knee-high rubber, yanked up bunker pants, hooked red suspenders over their shoulders with rigid thumbs: men swarmed into cabs, hands turned switches, snapped toggles, pressed buttons, counted to twelve, then hit the twin starters, whispering “Come on, damn you, start,” a profane, almost begging litany they held until Diesel engines snarled beneath them and began to steady, then to snarl impatiently, great shining steel monsters ready to surge screaming into battle.

The Captain was standing outside – he’d run forward, waited on the apron, looking left, looking right, holding up both hands to hold his troops – and his head snapped around like it was wound up on a stem of good gum rubber as he saw the Sheriff and another man run for the Sheriff’s spotless, gleaming, waxed and shining Suburban.

 

Cindy’s hand trembled a little as her fingertips rested on the Bat Phone’s red receiver.  Some wise wag, years before, had even painted the Batman insignia on it:  it was an old-fashioned, rotary-dial, desk phone, it was black with a red handset, and these days it was a hot line directly to the firehouse, to the police station, to the hospital, the Mayor’s office and the schoolhouses – and it was only used for genuine emergencies, or at times like this, when troops waited quivering like drawn bows, awaiting orders.

The Sheriff’s use of the General Quarters transmitter guaranteed all these entities were apprised of his words:  by now both schools, the elementary there in town and the Consolidated just outside the corp limits, would be evacuated, under guise of a fire drill, and the world at large would be listening, waiting, chafing and snorting like a bit-clattering racehorse before the gate slams open.

Neither the Sheriff nor nephew Nicodemus felt it, nor did any of the Irish Brigade, aboard their great red rumbling war-beasts, but their Captain did, as his feet were on the cement apron in front of the tall, narrow horse house:  the Mayor did, for his broad bottom was firmly planted in his office chair, and Cindy did, for her forearm was bearing hard against her desk, the desk was set on the polished quartz floor, and the floor was set on cut ashlars that sat on another layer of hand finished stones, and these sat on a layer of native bed rock.

The temblor shivered the earth beneath them:  a fine vibration at first, then a sudden jolt:  Uncle and Nephew looked at one another, puzzled, at the sound – deep, low-frequency, almost inaudible:  a stray dog a block away crouched, the white showing around its eyes, its tail snapping down between its legs:  the dog skulked quickly under the boardwalk in front of the Mercantile.

Cindy’s fingers jerked away from the Bat Phone like it was hot and she turned to her alarm panel:  one, then another, then a half dozen alarms lit up, each one setting off the annoying electronic tweety-bird:  fire, intrusion, robbery, almost every remote alarm in every building triggered from the quake.

Holding a drawn bow is tiring after a minute; troops waiting for the command to charge, fatigue quickly:  politicians, given an urgent alert, expect an immediate crisis to which they can respond in hopes of making the papers, or of being interviewed for the evening news:  men were looking at one another, wondering what was going on, or if anything was going to happen.

High school students, ranked in neat rows in the asphalt parking lot of the Firelands County High School, looked at one another and laughed nervously as the ground shivered underfoot, then jolted quickly, sharply against their soles:  here and there, a car alarm went off, and students and staff alike began to laugh, hands fumbled for key fobs, pressed buttons, ran for the offending vehicle to shut off the noisemaker.

A late evacuee from the athletic wing brought out an armload of footballs and shortly the fire drill deteriorated into a laughing, general, casual game of catch, with teachers, students, even the pricipal snatching a thrown obloid from the thin mountain air and slinging it back toward a shouting, gesturing recipient.

The grade school wasn’t quite as jubilant.

One teacher, impatient with standing out in the cold, blew her whistle and shouted, “Fifth grade, return!”

She stood, stern and disapproving, at the foot of the steps leading into the building, her attendance book in the crook of her arm, fine tipped pen ready to check off each student as they entered the building.

Her shuffling, scowling column approached the steps with obvious reluctance:  Alice Fritter was a joyless soul who regarded students as dough, as clay, to be molded into her vision of conformity:  she regarded the girls as suitable subjects, and the boys to be inferior, too restless, having too little attention span to effectively teach:  she consistently graded the girls high and the boys low, to the point that she was asked at a regular parent-teacher meeting why boys with As and Bs were suddenly getting Ds and Fs.

That was the last parent-teacher conference Alice Fritter attended, for she was perfect, she was an ideal teacher, she was above the petty concerns of the peasantry that sent their children to her to be molded into her vision of perfection.

The little boy at the head of her column stopped, looking into the open door, the empty hallway, threw his arms out to stop his classmates.

Alice took a step toward him, bent a little, blew the whistle:  angry, red-faced, she shouted, “Didn’t you hear the whistle?  Return to the classroom!”

She saw the boy’s eyes begin to widen.

Something blasted like a short, black rocket past her right ear and then a mule’s hoof about ten feet wide kicked her in the back and threw her fifteen feet out into the playground area.

 

Sheriff Linn Keller frowned as his Cannonball-mare flinched, then she whirled and informed him in her unmistakable way that she did not like her current residence, and she fully intended to stay for a time in San Francisco, and the fact that the pale eyed lawman with the iron grey mustache was on her back at the moment was absolutely unimportant.

Linn leaned forward a little as Cannonball laid her ears back and streaked down the main street, past the fire house and the corral and he let her run for about a mile before she settled down and he was able to use voice and hands, use knees and a shift of his weight, to get the mare to turn.

He rode her in a big circle and when he looked ahead, once he looked across Firelands, in the distance he saw a rolling mushroom of smoke boiling up into the clear mountain air.

What the Old Sheriff said in that moment does not bear repeating in polite company:  suffice it to say that, as his mare was warmed up and ready to keep on a-runnin’, he run her back into town and just went a-whippin’ past the firehouse as the big heavy double doors swung open and the three-horse hitch came a-boilin’ out, with the red-shirted Irish Brigade shouting, swearing and singing the way Irish warriors have done since time immemorial.

Between the heavy BOOOOMMMMM that hit the Sheriff and his mare right before Cannonball decided to light out for the far West coast, and that rolling ugly boil of dirty looking smoke climbing into the crystal air, Linn figured there was only one thing could make an explosion that size and smoke that big.

The railroad and the mine both used powder as an explosive; the mines and drillers both employed Crazy Hermey to manufacture nitroglycerin, which he did in a remote cabin near a cold mountain stream he used to wash the nitro.

He did most of his work in winter, when the nitro was much less sensitive:  someone tried blasting ice with nitro and found that it just would not detonate at twenty below zero, so generally Hermey made and stored his devil’s juice in cold weather.

The mine and the railroad both, though, maintained a good store of blasting powder, and they kept it close to where Hermey had the nitro, and the Sheriff had just this awful feeling that not only was the inventory of explosive gone, Hermey might be gone as well.

Cannonball skidded a little as she came to a bend in the trail:  she was well named, for when she ran, she launched like a ball from a cannon:  she had one speed and that was wide open, and she went into the turn too fast, which didn’t trouble her much:  she was steel shod and she was used to maneuvering at speed, but if a man watched close and the light was poor, why, he might see sparks throwed off those steel horse shoes when she hauled herself about.

Linn’s eyes were narrow and his butt was welded to saddle leather as the pair squatted around the turn: Cannonball drove forehooves against the earth, scrambling for purchase, got her legs under her again and assaulted the up-grade, hooves loud and hard-pounding.

Crazy Hermey was so named because you had to be crazy to work with nitro.

His nerves were shot, he lived on soda crackers and hard likker, his hands shook until he grasped his glass lab ware, then they were dead steady and as sure and gentle as a mother’s touch changing a baby’s diaper.

Crazy Hermey remembered being slapped by a giant’s hand and flying through the air, he recalled seeing trees sailing past him as he flew down hill and an ugly burning cloud expanding and boiling where he’d stood a moment before.

A surprisingly comfortable mattress of living boughs caught him as he flew:  his flight was arrested, he fell through more pines, he recalled the strong smell of pine pitch and he hit the ground and skidded down hill, he was too shocked from the blast to realize that, if a man has to be blown off the mountain, he’d been given the best ride possible:  a green, springy tree braked his flight, dropped him through yielding, energy absorbing boughs, he landed on a steep grade which further degraded his delivered energy, all of which meant nothing to him as he landed, rolling, in an absolutely, utterly, shockingly COLD!!!!!  mountain stream.

Hermey gasped, lifted his head, water dripping from his chin:  he slung his head, which brought its own case of the dizzies:  he raised his hand, wiped his face, snorted like an old b’ar, and an iron grip closed around his wrist and pulled.

Hermey pulled his legs up under him, stood, colder now that cold mountain stream-water was exposed to cold mountain air, and he looked up into a pair of ice-pale eyes and a worried expression.

He saw the man’s lips move but he couldn’t hear much:  he shook his head, leaned his head to the side, thumped the heel of his hand against the side of his head, got the water out of his ear, looked at the Sheriff.

“WHAT?” he asked, and Linn looked at his friend and said loudly, “KIND OF EARLY FOR YER SATURDAY NIGHT BATH, AIN’T IT?”

 

Most of the first-story windows in the grade school blew out.

The fifth grade class responded with one accord:  they turned and ran, scattering like quail, absolutely disregarding their dictatorial teacher’s order to return to their room.

The burning, fire-trailing acetylene tank launched in a low ballistic arc across the playground and down over the hill, falling to earth and digging into the dirt, causing it to tumble and spin:  it hit the concrete curb, drawing yellow arcs of living fire as it spun into the air, sailed over the hood of a startled matron returning home from grocery shopping, hit the far curb with a squirt of flame, flew into the air:  it hit side-on into the stone storefront and fell to the sidewalk, upside down, snuffing out its flame; it teetered and fell over, slowly, rolled downhill, dropped over the curb of an intersecting alley, rolled slowly across the alley, and bumped gently against the far curb, where it hissed out the very last of its acetylene payload.

Scanners were not uncommon in the community, and word travels fast in Firelands:  it did not take long at all for the general announcement that the grade school was blown to rubble, to spread far, wide and thoroughly, and many people were most pleased to discover that the initial report was rather exaggerated.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

28.  INVESTMENT

 

Sheriff Keller smiled quietly as he hung up the phone.

His nephew studied the man, his eyes veiled, considering the one side of the conversation he’d heard.

“You,” he said quietly, admiringly, “would probably play one hell of a game of poker.”

“I am a student of history.”

“You’re a pretty good liar.”

“I spoke no untruth.”

Nicodemus chuckled, shook his head, sighed.

“I bring you nearly twenty pounds of gold and nuggets, and you just give it away!”

Linn looked up, his eyes veiled.

“I very publicly gave away ten pounds of gold,” he corrected.  “I gave it to disaster relief.”  He looked at his nephew, his eyes an amused blue.  “By making that a very public declaration, by very publicly weighing out dust and nuggets to the right state agent, I guaranteed every milligram would be converted to currency and not one sou would be … misdirected.”

Nicodemus shook his head admiringly. 

“You clever scoundrel,” he nodded, his smile taking any offense from the words.

Linn’s look was innocence itself. 

“Nicodemus, how many men have seen ten pounds of gold in one pile?”

“Precious few,” his nephew admitted.

“When a man walks in and says this came from his claim and he’s donating every bit of it to disaster relief, after one of the worst disasters in the State, rather than keep it and be filthy rich from it …”

“Uncle Linn …”

Linn raised an eyebrow.

“Uncle Linn … what about the other ten pounds?”

Linn laughed.

“That’s my lead rod.”

“Your … come again?”

“My pale eyed ancestor.  Old Pale Eyes, remember him? – he had a decoy so no one would suspect he had even more gold tucked away.”

Nicodemus puzzled a moment, then nodded.  “Yes.  Yes, he did.  In his Journal, where he described where he found it …”

“And he described how he loaded that lead rod in the first leather sausage and filled in around it with dust.”

“Ah.”

“Ah, yes.  By the way” – Linn opened his drawer, pulled out a stack of bills, tossed the bundle casually toward his nephew.  “Your half.”

Nicodemus raised an eyebrow, then smiled and reached for the stack.

“Thank you.”

“You earned it.”

Nicodemus thrust the loot into the inside pocket of his suit jacket. 

“I hadn’t expected the generosity.”

“Muzzle not the kine that treadeth forth the grain.”  Linn grinned.  “I know you enjoyed educating those fellows with that wrecker.”

Nicodemus chuckled, nodded.  “Yes, sir, I did.”

“Nicodemus, do you have a regular paycheck?”

“Other than moments like this?”  He patted his suit jacket.  “No, not really.”

“How would you like a full time paycheck?”

“I could use one,” he admitted.

“Work for me, then.”

“As a deputy?”

“Over and above that.  You already have detective credentials.”

“As my cover, yes.”

“That,” Linn agreed, “but …”

He frowned a little, looked to his right, looked at the print of a glass plate that was found under the stairs of the old photography studio.

“The Black Agent,” Nicodemus murmured.

“I need someone unofficial, if that’s what’s needed.  Someone who can be official, if that’s needed.”

Nicodemus laughed, walked across the office, took a close look at the image of the old Sheriff’s Office, the print with Old Pale Eyes, his son and his daughter.

He turned and the Sheriff could see laughter in his nephew’s eyes.

“Sir,” he said quietly, barely able to suppress his laughter, “I’m not sure I’d look that good in a dress!”

 

Old Pale Eyes looked up at his daughter.

He hadn’t known for sure she was the get of his loins – not until a year before and a little more, when he studied the handwriting in the front cover of the Bible he’d taken from Dirty Sam’s belongings.

The bible had belonged to a woman beating scoundrel, a man who’d beat his wife to death and liked to beat the whores upstairs in what the Silver Jewel used to be.

A man who had a sweet little girl.

Old Pale Eyes had read that hand written account and he recognized the story he read and he realized that little girl who was growing up into a beautiful young woman, was his woods colt, half his crop of wild oats.

Now that sweet little girl, that growing young woman, was standing over him with a look on her face he’d never seen.

She was looking at her Sheriff with utter, absolute shock.

Linn grimaced, then pushed up off the ground, came to his feet.

“Good,” he said firmly.  “You listened.”

Sarah blinked, looking like a little girl who’d just got caught breaking her Mama’s favorite vase.

“Sarah,” Linn said gently, going to one knee, “you did that just right.  Do you see how leverage works to your advantage?”

Sarah wasn’t sure whether to giggle or cry.

“But … Sheriff … you’re big and I’m … just a girl, and –“

The Sheriff took her hands and laughed gently.  “Sarah,” he said, “you need to know how to do things I can teach you.”  He tilted his head.  “You are not a girl anymore, Sarah.  You are a woman and a pretty one.”  He squeezed her hands a little.  “Sarah, you know how your Mama takes you to Denver, she gussies you up and puts her gowns on you?”

Sarah smiled – almost bashfully, but Linn saw something behind the bashful look.

She likes getting all gussied up, he thought.

“Sarah, when you step out on that stage, you look like a grown woman, you know that.”

“I’ve … been told that.”

“Sarah, do you know the greatest secret to win a man’s heart?”

Sarah blinked, surprised.

“Sarah, all you have to do is give a man those lovely eyes of yours.  Give him those gorgeous eyes and hang on every word he says like he’s the most fascinating thing you’ve ever heard” – the Sheriff clasped his hands beside his theft, batting his eyes in a silly caricature of a moonstruck girl, which brought more giggles from Sarah – “even if it’s the most boring drivel you’ve been inflicted upon!”

This time his expression was that of a Moorish idol, which brought more laughter, which was partly his goal.

With laughter comes acceptance, he knew, and it was a trick he’d used to good effect in the past.

“Sarah.”  He patted her hand between his.  “The Judge thinks you are the ideal agent to find things out.”

Sarah blinked, her mouth opened.

“I … an agent?”

Linn nodded.

“You’ve heard of the Pinkertons.”

“Everyone’s heard of the Pinks.”

“Did you know one of their best agents was a woman?”

“No.”  The gears began turning behind her big, lovely eyes.  “No … I didn’t … really?”

“Yes,” Linn grinned, and his grin was not entirely pleasant.

As a matter of fact, it was positively wolflike.

“Yes.”

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

29.  TRUE COLORS

Sheriff Linn Keller, chief law enforcement officer for the county, was a hard muscled man who knew the taste of his own blood.

In his young life he'd been shot, stabbed, cut, run into, run over, and a street evangelist tried to save his corroded soul.

He'd worn Uncle Sam's baggy BDUs and carried the idiot stick and he'd put boot prints on various parts of the world, he'd come back alive, and here at home he'd faced up to and faced down a variety of large and angry people bearing a variety of weapons, and he'd had to make that last tenth-of-a-second decision whether to put that last tenth of an ounce of pressure on the trigger, and then live with that decision.

Now this hard man, this man with calluses on his palms and scars in various places on his long tall carcass, regarded the figure before him with steady and unwavering eyes.

His hands were sure, they knew their work, and though the assault had been impressive, it hadn't stopped him.

His wife Connie leaned against the doorway and watched as her husband finished changing the baby's diaper.

Linn looked up and Connie saw a tightening at the corners of his eyes as he carried the noisome bundle to the diaper butler and sealed the smell into a twist of plastic:  "Remind me to install an exhaust fan in here!"

Connie waited until he'd washed his hands and then settled the little one back to sleep before walking barefoot up behind her husband.

She embraced him from behind and he laid his hands on hers as she molded herself into his back.

He waited a moment before turning, wrapping his arms around his beloved.

"You do that so well," she whispered.

He laid his cheek down on top of her head and nodded.  "Let's go back to bed," he whispered back.

She loosened her grip and squeaked in surprise as he swept her up, carried her across the hall to their bedroom.

He laid her down in the slight depression she'd occupied before they were wakened; he pulled the covers up over her, worked them in under her chin and around her ears, before coming around and sliding under the blankets beside her.

His hand found hers, squeezed.

"You always surprise me," she whispered.

"How's that?"

"You found two fortunes in gold and gave them both away."

He chuckled.  "It wasn't the gold," he admitted, "it was the finding of it, and it was recruiting an Agent."

"Why didn't you give all of it away at once?"

He sighed.  "Ten pounds of gold, good God, that's a lottery win right there."

"We could have retired very comfortably on that."

"Our retirement is already taken care of."

"I know."  She rolled up on her side, cuddled into her husband.  "You are such a good provider."

"Specially for you, Sweet Pea.  No, that other ten pound ... I gave Nicodemus a pile of cash from it, but the rest went to relief."

"Those poor people."  Connie shivered.  "We were burned out once."

Linn nodded in the darkness:  when word came of the fire that swept that state, Connie had gotten real quiet, and she had a haunted look about her, for she'd lost everything when she was a young woman, lost it to a catastrophic fire:  she still bore scars from that conflagration, and sometimes had nightmares from it.

"It got me an Agent and I think he'll be effective."

"Couldn't you just have hired him?"

Linn smiled in the darkness.

"I had to know ..." he began, then, "He needed the cash.  I need to know how he'll handle that sudden wealth, and I had to know that he was just ... his morals were just loose enough to make an effective Agent."

Connie's hand rested on his chest and he felt her breathing change, and he knew she was asleep already, just that fast.

I must be awful boring, he thought.  

If I read to her, or I talk too long in bed, she goes sound asleep.

He smiled again, for he'd read something along those lines in his pale eyed ancestor's third journal book.

In the next room, the youngest Keller made a sleepy little baby sound and chewed on a tiny pink fist, and soon all within were peacefully asleep.

 

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

30.  CURANDERA

 

She was Mexican, or most in Carbon Hill said, judging from the huaraches she wore:  with her scarf, her simple dress, she could have been any of a number of nationalities, but Mexican suited the common curiosity.  She hardly ever spoke, and when she did, it was in a hoarse whisper; if she made a purchase at the Mercantile, she either brought the goods to the counter, or pointed to what she wanted:  she always paid in coin, and what she bought almost always emptied her meager, worn purse.

Once, and once only, had anyone seen her scarf pulled back.

Normally she wore it not only over her head, but well forward of her face; she walked with kind of a quick shuffle, with just the hint of a limp, and her head bowed as if it were too heavy to carry upright:  by an accident of wind had her scarf ballooned out enough to let part of her face be seen plainly, and the two men and a slatternly saloon girl who saw the revealed visage, shivered to see it:  one eye was pale, obviously blind, and a horrible scar crossed down from the raw-looking lower eyelid and slashed an ugly line across what might have originally been a pretty face.

One, then another of the miners spoke of her, whether with a fellow swinger of the pick in the damp, poorly lighted mine face, or maybe in the dirty, low-ceilinged saloon.

Carbon Hill lacked a physician and so folks patched themselves as best they could; if they needed a doc bad enough, they could take the train to Firelands and see Doc Greenlees or that Navajo of his -- they were both pretty good -- and so when a miner sought relief for a boil on his backside, it was this Mexican woman, this curandera, who heated a whiskey bottle in a pan of hot water, then nicked the ripe, bulging, incredibly painful boil with a small, sharp flint shard:  after she gently (or as gently as can be done to such a sufferer!) expressed as much corruption as would come out easily, she put the mouth of that hot whiskey bottle against the opened lesion:  as it cooled, it pulled, and one, then another core got pulled out, some extruding like a limp worm, but two shot out with such a velocity they hit the bottom of the bottle.

The Mexican woman tended the miner with a poultice, a fragrant tea and then a stiff shot of something water clear that went down nice and smooth before it reached up and belted the man over the gourd with a young war club:  with his backside freshly bandaged and his balance shot to hell, he went a-stagger down the street, and for the first time in a handful of nights, he slept without difficulty.

It's amazing, he would say later, how much better a man will sleep if his butt don't hurt.

It may be that she'd been outcast, called a bruja and run out of her village under a hail of hard-thrown rocks, or maybe her man died and she ended up in this coal mining town by accident -- no one could remember a Mex being killed in the mines, nor for that matter any Mexes dying here for some long time -- but none were terribly curious how she got there.

Law and Order Harry Macfarland tried roping a mestena that didn't want roped, and ended up with a rope burn across his palm, just deep enough to hurt like a burn and start to weep a little blood:  that Mexican woman grabbed his wrist right after he dropped that rope and swore, and Harry, surprised, just stood there and let her work on him.

She had a poke of some kind slung across from one shoulder to the opposite hip and she reached in, pulled out a clean rag and a pint bottle of something water clear -- water, it was, boiled and cooled, but he didn't know this -- her touch was gentle as she washed the burn and wiped the water from around the injury, allowing it the air: she tilted her head, obviously studying the wound:  into the warbag again, and out with a fine, slender pair of tweezers:  she turned his hand palm up, raised it so the palm was at her eye level, and flat, so she was looking across it, and she picked hairs from that rope out of the burn.

Finally she put this away and brought out a little milk glass jar, twisted off the flat brass lid, ran her middle finger into a cream of some kind:  it smelled like alfalfa, it had little green flecks in it, but when she worked this into the rope burn, the hurt went away instantly if not sooner.

Finally she wrapped his palm in a clean cloth, crossed it once, brought it back and around his wrist, tied it in an almost delicate little square knot.

"You leave," she said in her hoarse whisper.  "Leave two days.  I see you here two days" -- then she turned and hobbled away, her woven huaraches shuffling a little as she did.

Sure enough, Harry was back in two days; the mustang made off with his lariat, which was eventually returned to him, but that damned horse never did allow itself to get caught, and for all the town marshal knew, it was still heading for who knows where at a dead run, which it could and be damned as far as he was concerned.

He was loafing against the corral, contemplating the memory of the horse he hadn't paid for that made good its exit, and he turned to find the curandera standing beside him.

"George Hosaphat," he exclaimed, "don't sneak up on me like that!"

She reached out, gripped his wrist, pulled it to her:  she turned his hand palm up, untied her dainty little square knot, unwrapped the hand.

Under the bandage, the flesh was closing, pink, soft, but healed over.

Harry worked his hand a little, staring.

"Now I will be sawed off and damned," he murmured.  "I woulda thought a scab ..."

The Mexican woman turned, shuffled toward the Mercantile.

"Hey," Harry called, reaching a thumb and forefinger into a vest pocket.  "How much do I owe ya?"

The woman stopped, turned:  she shuffled back to him, her leather sandals whispering on the packed dirt.

She reached into her slung bag, withdrew the little jar of cream, handed it to him.

"Give to su esposa," she whispered, as if the words were almost over taxing her throat:  she patted his hand like an old woman will and added, "You good man.  You needed" -- then she turned and hobbled away, shuffling up beside the Mercantile and down the little alley as if heading for the railroad tracks.

The telegrapher looked up to see a figure turn away from the barred window.

He reached up, drew the slip toward him, with its coins on top.

It was always like this.

The Mexican woman slipped up when nobody was looking, put the telegram on the window sill with payment in full, then she scratched at the window and turned quickly away so he couldn't see her.

He suspected she was a messenger, a poor old woman making a few coins by delivering someone else's messages.

He shrugged, his hand busy on the key, his sounder clattering loudly in the stove-heated office.

The messages couldn't have come from her.

The telegrapher threw the knife switch that powered his key, gripped the button and began to send.

He sent smoothly, with the ease of long practice.

The messages, he thought with part of his mind, always start the same.

TO SHERIFF FIRELANDS FROM SLR

Today's message was brief as the others.

NOTHING FOUND STILL LOOKING

 

Linn frowned at his cell phone.

His nephew was late reporting in and this was never a good thing.

His most recent message was 24 hours earlier, a text.

"Aunt Sarah saw nothing."

This was his way of reporting he hadn't found a damned thing about the drugs that were coming into his county.

The Sheriff sent back a coded message:  "Have Aunt Sarah call me."

Cindy looked across the lobby, saw the look on her boss's face, looked away and shivered.

 

 

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

31.  BLOOD

 

 

She blinked, caught the phone on its first ring.

“Firelands County Sheriff’s Office.”  Professional voice, hand picks up pencil, hesitates.

She turned.  “Sheriff?  It’s NASA.”

Five minutes later Sheriff Linn Keller came out of his office, looking pale, looking sick.

 

The curandera seized her shawl, yanked it viciously off her shoulders, wrapped it tightly around the man’s arm.

She pulled a short-bladed, very sharp knife from somewhere, slashed at the material:  she split the cloth, counter-wound it around the wrapped wound, tied it tightly, a desperate attempt to stop the blood.

She split the remainder of the shawl, bound the second and third slashes – someone had tortured this man, someone wanted him to hurt and to bleed, and he’d done plenty of both, it was his screams brought the healer running – then she rocked back on her heels, trying hard not to throw up.

She turned her head, eyes widening:  her hand flew to her bosom as a snarling man swung a weighted quirt at her face – she fell back, pushing off with heels digging into the dirt, the quirt barely missed her nose – and the bulldog .44 boomed three times before she landed flat on her back.

The .44 did not miss, the bullets tracked upward:  she hit the attacker low, middle and high, each hit would have killed him, but the third left no doubt a’tall as to its effectiveness.

It went into his nose and out the top of his head.

She chopped her revolver down out of recoil, its bore settled on the second man.

“Tell me what happened here,” she hissed, her eyes pale, hard, unforgiving.

 

The second man carried the tortured, unconscious victim the short distance into Carbon Hill.

The curandera put two fingers to her lips, whistled, a long, shrill note:  Law and Order Harry Macfarland looked up, then, not bothering to unhook his thumbs from his belt, straightened from his casual slouch against a porch post, strolled down the street toward the approaching trio.

He gave the curandera a long look as he saw she had a short, blocky pistol she had screwed into the small of the second man’s back; the Marshal’s eyes were busy, and he frowned as he considered the blood soaked nature of the bandages.

“He was tortured,” the curandera rasped, and Harry noticed for the first time that horrible scar down her face, the raw looking lower lid, the perpetual shine of a tear track from the injured eye:  “this one helped and I killed the hijo de puta” – she spat – “who did the torture.”

Macfarland knew the prisoner, and unfortunately he knew the victim:  the victim had struck gold, a good poke of dust gained from months of panning, and when he questioned the prisoner afterward, he confirmed his suspicion that the tortured man was being encouraged to reveal the location of even greater riches.

Once the victim was on the evening train to Firelands, once he’d ridden out to the dead man’s carcass, once he read the story in the bloodied ground and retrieved the poke of gold from the dead man’s coat, he stood, arms folded, considering all he’d seen.

He looked at the Mexican healer and realized she didn’t look very Mexican, in spite of her attire.

She could see a question in his eyes and waited patiently for him to speak.

“What’s wrong with your voice?”  he asked.

“A lover with a knife,” she whispered hoarsely, her fingers rising to the scar that ran from her bloodshot, watering eye down her face and across her throat. 

“I used to sing opera.”

 

“Firelands General, Firelands Squad One.”

The desk clerk turned in her swivel chair, pressed the key.  “Firelands, go.”

The ER staff could hear the siren in the background as a man’s carefully-professional voice followed.  “Firelands ER, Squad One, we are transporting code three a twenty-two-year-old male patient with multiple lacerations, how copy?”

“Copy, Squad One.”

The ER doc leaned over the nurse’s station counter, listening carefully, as was the charge nurse.

“Patient is not conscious and is not responsive to sternal rub.  Pulse weak and thready at 122, irregularly irregular, blood pressure 52 systolic, respers 34, we are running two large bore IVs of normal saline and ten liters 02 via rebreather.  Bleeding is controlled, lacerations are extensive and deep, this was a knife attack, ETA twelve minutes, have you any questions or orders?”

The clerk looked up at the pair leaning over the counter; they each shook their head.

“Negative, One, we’ll be ready.”

“Roger.”

“Clear Room One, get surgery on standby, I want blood and I want it yesterday, call the police and tell them we have an assault victim coming in,” the charge nurse snapped, all in one breath.

The clerk nodded, turned, picked up the telephone, fingers dancing over the familiar keypad.

 

Connie Keller stared sightlessly at the kitchen clock.

It was after midnight.

Her eyes wandered toward the living room, toward the scanner, silent now.

She’d heard the squad call their emergency room with the report, and Connie knew the patient’s vitals – and the clipped, succinct nature of the medic’s report – meant the patient was in shock, that the patient was in bad shape, that the patient was probably more a candidate for a cold slab than a warm hospital bed.

Her husband the Sheriff was usually home long and long before this.

That he was not, did not bode well at all, and so she sat up, waiting.

She’d given up on the idea of sleeping at all that night; part of her considered how much a shame this was – the baby was sleeping, not even a whimper – she knew how often diaper changes were, and she changed the sleeping child, hoping perhaps that this would keep young distress from waking them when the Sheriff finally came home to bed – but the later it got, the more the cold claw of dread wrapped itself around her heart.

Her hands were cupped around a mug of what was now lukewarm coffee, and she stared at the clock.

 

Reverend John Burnett laid a sympathetic hand on the Sheriff’s shoulder.

He’d seen the lawman in joy and in anger and in triumph and in fatigue, but he’d never seen the man looking this utterly, absolutely lost.

A broad wedge of good home made pie sat before the pale eyed Sheriff, untouched; his coffee was gone cold, barely tasted.

Linn rested his forehead against the heels of his palms, his elbows on the table; he drew in a long, slow breath, his shoulders rising, then falling as he exhaled just as deliberately.

He leaned back in his chair as the Parson withdrew his hand.

“A father ought to keep his children safe,” Linn said, his voice hoarse, quiet:  “I know here” – he tapped bent fingers against his forehead – “this is not possible, but here” – he thumped the middle of his chest, hard, as if punishing himself – “I don’t know it here.”

Reverend Burnett nodded, waiting.

“Parson” – Linn always addressed the sky pilot as “Parson,” whether preacher, priest, rabbi or reverend – “I appreciate your seeing me on short notice.”

Linn’s jaw was open a little, and thrust forward; the Reverend could tell the Sheriff was a troubled man.

He just didn’t realize quite how troubled.

“Marnie is alive.”

The Reverend nodded slowly; he knew she’d survived a deadly attack the moment she set foot on the Red Planet, but he didn’t know the full particulars.

“She” – Linn started breathing quickly, short sharp breaths, then he closed his eyes, took a long breath.  “She’s used to … she was born her, Parson, she was raised here, she’s used to thin air.”

The Parson frowned a little as a dread of anticipation suggested what this might mean.

“There was an … accident … of some kind.  Catastrophic decompression, they called it.  Marnie … survived.  She managed to shut the air locks that kept the entire complex from  …”

He stopped, swallowed, bit his bottom lip, dropped his head, his good right hand tightening into a fist – a trembling fist, closed so tight the good Reverend heard one, then another of the man’s knuckles crack.

“They’re calling her a hero, Parson.  She saved a lot of lives.  She did not pass out, she stayed conscious and she saved …”

He swallowed hard.

“She blames herself for not saving more.”

The Reverend nodded.  “In that,” he said quietly, “she’s like her father.”

“Yeah,” Linn gasped.  “She always did follow my bad examples.”

The Sheriff looked distinctly unwell.

“My nephew,” he said, “was working undercover and got … he’s … he may die.”

“How bad?”  the Parson asked, immediately regretting the question:  “where is he now?”

“Our hospital.  He’s still in surgery.”

“Does he need blood?”

“I’ve already given.”  Linn smiled tightly.  “O-triple-neg.  No antibodies of any kind on my cell surfaces.  I can give to the immunocompromised, the elderly, the newborn.  Marnie has the same blood.”

“Is that why they picked her for Mars?”

“I think that was partly it.”

The Parson nodded.

“Sheriff, if he’s in surgery now, is there anything you yourself can do to help him?”

Linn shook his head, his face the very image of hopeless misery.

“Then go home.  Hug your wife, kiss that fine little baby of yours, lay down.  You might not get any sleep but it’ll do you good to lay down in your own bed.”

Linn nodded.

“You’re going back to the hospital, aren’t you?”

Linn nodded, picked up the coffee, downed the mug without taking a breath:  he wiped his mouth savagely on his shirt sleeve, set the mug down, his eyes pale. 

“Yeah.” 

He looked at the Parson, his eyes hard and unforgiving as a falling granite boulder.

“If he wakes up I have to be there.  I may be the only one who can understand what he says.”

 

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

32.  THE OLD BLOCK, AND ITS CHIP

 

Dr. John Greenlees drew the sheet up over the dead man’s face.

“I don’t know how he lived this long,” he admitted.

He looked over at the young woman with the horrible scar, the young woman dressed like an old Mexican woman:  he knew this young woman, but he knew her as someone quite different from the image she was presenting.

She’d gotten a shawl from somewhere, she’d thrown the shawl over her head and around her shoulders again, but here, here in the privacy of the Doctor’s office, she loosened it and dropped it back from her head and glared at the dead man as if at a personal enemy.

As a matter of fact, Dr. Greenlees wondered whether the sheet covering the dead man was going to catch fire from the power of her pale eyed glare.

Sarah Lynne McKenna, Agent of the Firelands District Court, glided silently across the floor, pulled the sheet back down:  she took the doctor’s shining steel scissors and sliced the bandages away, exposing the horror of the dead man’s injuries.

“I bound these wounds,” she said – hissed, rather, her flesh tightening over her cheekbones, white to her very lips – “I wrapped them, I drew them tight, I stopped his bleeding.”  She looked up at the physician.  “I did it right, Dr. Greenlees.  I, stopped, his bleeding.” 

Her voice was intense, quivering.

“I did my part.”

Her voice was an accusing whisper as she slitted her eyes at the dead man’s darkening face.  “I did my part.  Why didn’t he do his?”

The Sheriff walked slowly up behind the intense young woman, gripped her shoulders, squeezed gently, very gently.

“Sometimes,” he said in a deep, reassuring Daddy-voice, “sometimes in spite of our best … how hard we try … it doesn’t work.”

“Then why try?”

Her voice was dry, hoarse, strained, the voice of an old woman.

“Why even bother?”

“We have to,” the Sheriff said.  “It’s the only chance they have.”

Sarah twisted out from under his hands, shouldered him back, ran for the door:  both men watched her go, heard the outer door open, then shut.

Dr. Greenlees carefully bound the gaping, bled-out wounds again, crossed the arms over the dead man’s belly, drew the sheet up again.

Sarah stopped outside the unfinished hospital, the shawl over her head, her hands clutching and winding up in the concealing material:  she wavered, then ran again, ran grimly, ran until she came to a barn she knew well.

She turned sideways, slipped through the barely-open door, reached blindly to the side and snatched up the pitchfork she knew was there.

The shawl was left collapsing in midair as Sarah spun the four-tined weapon, charged:  she drove the steel tines hilt-deep in the sawdust-filled canvas bag, hitting it hard enough to swing it away from her:  she jerked the tines free, spun again, grunted as she drove the butt of the handle into canvas hard enough to rip a hole through the heavy material.

Now that she’d begun an attack, every bit of hold-back abandoned her young soul and she began to assault the sack in earnest:  she used her size to advantage, keeping a low, wide stance, making leverage and momentum her friend as she proceeded to absolutely murder the hanging canvas striking bag, until at last, with multiple tearing insults to its midsection, the material tore, slowly, the sawdust filled lower half sagging and spilling as it swung a little in the barn’s shadowed interior.

Sarah’s breathing was ragged, more a snarl than breathing:  she turned, paced away from the bag:  lips peeled back, even white teeth shining as she literally bared her fangs, she turned and drove the pitchfork through the air like a hard-thrown lance.

“Nice shot,” the Sheriff said, his voice surprisingly loud in the shadowed hush:  Sarah’s attacks had been silent, no more than a grunt when delivering a particularly powerful blow:  “Remind me never to get you mad at me.”

Sarah glared at the man, jaw hanging, breathing deep and deliberate.

“Have a set.”  The Sheriff eased his backside down on a hay bale.

Sarah did the same.

Linn laid his arm across Sarah’s shoulders and she leaned into him with a tired sigh.

“I didn’t know anger was so tiring,” she whispered.

Linn leaned down and kissed the top of her head.

“It’s exhausting,” he whispered back. 

“Experience?”

“Lots.”

“I don’t think I like … being angry.”

“Then don’t.”

“You make it sound easy.”

“It’s not.  I still get angry.  I know I have the choice but sometimes it’s the right choice.”  His hand squeezed her far shoulder.  “Anger is fire in your boiler.  You have to keep it contained to the firebox so it’ll fuel what you need.  Given its head, anger will consume you as surely as a runaway fire.”

“That’s what it felt like,” Sarah shivered.

“No.”  Linn’s voice was flat.  “No, Sarah, you hadn’t let it run away yet.  You were focused like sunlight through a burning-glass.  Yours was focused on a point, you discharged … you used your anger like a lightning rod.  It all ran down the braided cable you laid for it.”

“I couldn’t save him,” she whispered, upturned palms and closing fingers forming anger-tight fists:  “I did everything right and I couldn’t save him!”

“You sound like me,” Linn whispered, and he felt Sarah’s arm come across his back:  a moment later she was gripping him around the chest as they sat, her face buried in his shoulder.

He expected to feel the steam-hot dampness of tears soaking through the material, but he didn’t; her embrace loosened and she turned to look at the limp, barely swaying remnant of what used to be a homemade heavy bag.

“I thought to go apologize to him,” she said, her voice hollow-sounding.  “Then I realized it wouldn’t do any good.”

Linn nodded.

“You said I sound like you”

“Yeah.”

“The war?”

“Yeah.”

“You couldn’t save someone.”

“No.”  Linn dropped his head.  “No.”

“The Lieutenant?”

He nodded again.

“When the cannon blew up.”

Another nod.

“There was nothing you could do.”

Linn took a long breath, looked at his pale eyed daughter’s worried expression.

“I knew it here” – he touched her forehead with a gentle fingertip – “but in here” – he tapped his breastbone – “I didn’t want to know it.”

He looked at the limp sack swinging slowly from the twisted hemp that ran up into the rafters.

“Time was when I’d have taken that pitchfork and done more and worse to that bag than you just did, and you were genuinely impressive.”

“You’re still … angry.”

“No.”  He shook his head.  “No, not anger.  Anger isn’t a hard enough word for … what’s in our blood.”

“Rage, then.”

“That’s close as anything, I reckon.”

“So my own rage will go away?”
“I doubt it,” he admitted honestly.  “You can will it to leave, and it will.  You can choose not to let it consume you, and it won’t.”

His eyes paled and he drew the words out as they slithered off his tongue:  “Iiit feeelsss gooood.”  He blinked, then closed his eyes and shook his head.  “That’s why it’s dangerous, Sarah.  That’s why you must rule it and rule it now.  If you don’t, it’ll rule you because it does feel good!”

 

Linn knew his hand written note would be digitized and sent as a radio signal; it would be received, perhaps after multiple relay transmitters, it would be decoded, printed on a recycle flimsy and had delivered to his daughter.

His stylus stroked the screen of his electronic tablet, his letters deliberately big, his characters carefully formed.

He frowned at the single paragraph he’d written and swore.

“Do you want to dictate it instead?”  Connie asked in her patient, gentle voice, and he nodded, turned off the tablet, set it aside.

A moment later, he was looking at his own face on his laptop screen.

He leaned forward; the image appeared to be peering through a culvert.

“Marnie,” he said, “I am very proud of you.  I understand you kept your people alive.  I don’t have all the details” – he looked away, snorted – “Marnie, I’m up to my elbows in alligators and right now I’d like to rip the neck off an anvil barehand.”

He glared back at the screen.

“I have much to tell you but right now I’m not in the mood.”  He looked away from the screen again.  “Connie, shut this thing off, I’m not sending this.”

The Sheriff rose, stalked across the room and opened the basement stairway door:  his wife followed, phone in hand:  she knew her husband and she knew his moods, and she knew he was more than profound unhappy, and she knew he was charged up with anger like a fat summer thundercloud is charged with lightning.

It was going to discharge and they both knew he preferred to control its discharge.

The Sheriff bought a sleeping bag cover the day before; he’d filled it with dried sawdust, it was hung in their basement in the same place his Mama hung sleeping bag covers filled with sawdust, and for the same reason.

His pale eyed Mama was blessed with the same thundercloud of temper and as a boy he used to watch her beat her homemade heavy bag.

Fists, feet, elbows, knees … pale eyes glared at the olive drab canvas, work-callused hands worked into thin leather gloves.

Connie held the phone up, knowing she may as well be invisible: her husband’s focus was on the bag and she knew from his descriptions of these moments that he was mentally projecting all his anger, all his hate, onto this swinging opponent.

When Marnie received the message he’d dictated, complete with the “Connie, shut this thing off” and the video of her dear old Dad’s savage assault of the hanging canvas cylinder – his sudden, savage and utterly silent attack, cold, efficient, fired with anger, fueled with utter hate – when Sheriff Marnie Keller watched Sheriff Linn Keller’s detonation of fast, efficient violence, she smiled a little, for as a child she too sat on the basement steps and watched as her pale eyed Papa laid murderous rage on the sawdust filled canvas, until the canvas was torn, ripped apart by impact and its own weight, and sawdust cascaded to the smooth cement floor.

Dr. John Greenlees Jr. leaned over her shoulder and smiled a little, gripped her shoulders like he did when she invited him over to watch her Papa’s messages.

He set a small, very thin cup down, filled with a shimmering purple liquid.

“Medicinal alcohol and fruit juice,” he whispered.  “Don’t tell anyone.”

Marnie knew alcohol was synthesized – clandestinely, but expertly – and the fruit juices were donated from the rations, freighted at an unholy price across millions of miles of space:  this small juice glass and its potent payload was probably worth a year’s wages.

“For medicinal purposes only,” Marnie smiled as she picked up the rare treat.

“What has your father so angry?  It takes quite a bit to light his fuse.  I’ve seen him like that twice and both times …”
“I remember.”  Marnie watched the rest of the digi-vid, turned off the glowing thinscreen. 

She stood, raised her medicinal purple.

“To old blocks and their chips,” Doc Greenlees proposed.

They drank.

Marnie savored the taste, then smiled as she handed the thin, delicate cup back to the physician, tilted her head a little.  “Old blocks and their chips,” she said speculatively.  “Are you calling me a chippie?”

“What would you like me to call you?”
She stepped in close, tilted her head back, eyes half-lidded:  her hands were warm on his back as she drew him close.

Her mouth tasted like fruit juice and passion, and the doctor felt the passion of a young man pushing aside the caution he’d tried hard to cultivate.

He needn’t have worried.

They were both off duty for a cycle, and they were not interrupted.

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

33.  THE LLEWELLYN EFFECT

 

I waited.

It was dark and so was my soul.

I was here to murder two men.

No.

Not men.

Monsters.

Two who do not deserve the respect of being called men, two who brought pain and brought terror and who brought misery and the knowledge that their victim was now  --

I stilled my thoughts, disciplined my breathing.

It was quiet out, and cool:  I wore a mask of my own devising, one that directed my exhaled breath down into my shirt front, so the steam of my breath might not be seen on the moonlit air.

I, and I alone, could do this thing with the authority with which I was entrusted, and for that reason my Sheriff’s badge was at home in the drawer.

My location was carefully chosen; I could strike from here, strike and be gone, unseen, thanks to the terrain:  I’d scouted it multiple times in multiple times of day, always stealthily, always watching for where I might be spotted from:  my clothing was close fitting, black, elastic at neck and ankles, I wore a pantyhose hood, there was no chance of me shedding skin cells to be picked up by a DNA swab.

My tools were sterile.

I’d made them myself, in another man’s shop, while the man was gone on vacation; the tools that touched my weapons were brought in by me and taken out by me, I’d cleaned up after myself, I left the place cleaner than when I arrived, which he would never notice – I knew the man, and I knew he’d be on vacation, and I knew how to get into his shop – the advantage of being Sheriff.

I knew how to make what I needed, and make them I did.

I practiced with what I’d made, not that it was necessary – I’d been practicing since early childhood, inspired by the stories Mama read me from the several Journals.

These two had been the chief torturers, flaying my nephew alive.

Tonight these two would pay the price.

The law was that of the star court; the judge was waiting in the dark for them, the jury was my own determination, the verdict was determined when they first put sharpened blade to my kinsman’s living flesh.

The straight-grained, hardwood arrow whispered deadly secrets to the handmade longbow, as I drew it back to the corner of my jaw, three fingers hooked around the twisted, waxed bowstring.

I brought their judgement upon them silently, from the darkness, firing at the one looking towards me, then the one that had been looking away:  the steel tipped arrow flew straight, true, the air was still and did not knock its flight aside; the second murderer heard the sound of the arrow penetrating the skull of his fellow and he turned, in time to inherit a clothyard shaft precisely through the tip of his nose and back through the porous, hollow sinuses, and through his brainstem.

Two down.

They would be found, where they fell, as would the arrows; I’d never touched the arrows barehand, there would be no fingerprints, no DNA, no skin cells, nothing that could be linked with me:  I had a third arrow nocked, I waited, silent, not moving, for twenty heartbeats, then I slipped away in the dark.

I was their Azriel, their Angel of Death, and I sent two murderers to hell.

 

The Society of the Rose predates our very nation.

It existed as a Star Court, presiding at a higher level than the judicial system, handling those cases that could not be tended by the existing legal system, whether due to the rank of the offender, the nature of the offense, or a flaw in the law itself:  these gatherings were held in solemn assembly, with a rose suspended from the star-painted ceiling – the ceiling decoration symbolized Heaven itself, which was the only authority higher than the Star Court, and the rose reminded all present that what happened here was sub rosa – under the rose – and all present were oathbound to maintain that solemn secrecy.

It took me about two hours to get to the rendezvous, two hours in which I trod a careful path, staying to the rocky and the hard-to-track areas:  only a bloodhound could have followed me, I was satisfied, and even that would prove problematic as I pulled on a pair of rubber overboots and waded upstream for a half mile.

When I finally reached the pickup point, I unstrung and cased the handmade bow, coiled the bowstring and stowed it in a separate baggie:  the extra arrows went in their own padded case, and these were then placed inside a plastic trash sack, these were placed in the back of another lawman’s vehicle, and we drove for an hour, mostly listening to our own thoughts.

My old friend, to quote Sherlock Holmes, “had the most marvelous gift of silence,” and he left me to my thoughts, at least until we came to the county line.

He eased his Crown Vic to a gentle stop, then looked at me.

“You need anything – anything at all – you know you can ask.”

I nodded, thrust out my hand.

“Walk with me.”

We got out.

I retrieved my bundle from the cruiser’s trunk; he closed the lid, and we walked a little ways down the lane.

“If I don’t know it, I can’t testify to it,” he said carefully, “so I won’t ask.”

I nodded.

“If it was my nephew, I’d likely go after ‘em myself.”

I nodded again.

We stopped.

There was a little moon, enough to paint Carbon Hill’s graveyard in shades of black-and-white.

“The Rose,” I said quietly, and his smile was quick and wolflike.

“The Rose,” he said, voicing his understanding.

He went his way and I went mine, and my path took me around the lower end of the graveyard.

I slipped like a ghost through the shadows of a ghost town.

There was a little shack I knew of, a shack that looked like the ruin of the rest of the town, but a shack with a clean floor and a clean chair, a shack with its cracks and crevices blinded with a draping of heavy black plastic.

I drew my blackout shroud over the door and I changed out of my black stealth outfit; I changed into jeans and my regular boots and a flannel shirt and my vest, and when I looked around before emerging, I looked like I usually did.

The handmade bow was under a floorboard; the string I would burn, in case it picked up dust or dirt or even pollen that could be connected with the site of the execution.

I walked less than five minutes before stopping; a whistle, and the sound of hooves replied to my whistle, and shortly after that I rode for home.

I rode with a clean conscience, and a sense of satisfaction, and I slept well that night, for what I had done, was right.

I had killed the pair that tried to murder my nephew, slowly, by torturing him, and leaving him to bleed to death.

 

Daffyd Llewellyn’s fists closed and he tried to bridle his young, incendiary temper.

“Mama,” he said, “why won’t you TELL me?”

Sarah turned, her eyes pale, hard:  “Daffyd,” she said, her words clipped, “you will do as you are told.”

“Mama,” Daffyd grated, “why don’t you want me to tell anyone –“

Sarah’s hard-swung slap was defeated by Daffyd’s quick block:  he caught her forearm coming in, came up on its back side, drew his head back and batted the open hand past his face, no longer controlled:  he stepped back, eyes pale and hard and he crouched a little, drawing into himself, and both he and Sarah felt a mild sense of shock – Daffyd, that his Mama would goad this response from him, and Sarah, that she’d erred so grievously as to cause her son to ready for an attack.

“Daffyd, I –“ she began, and he saw something he’d never seen:  he saw her eyes change, the resolve ran out of her soul like water draining out of a holed boot sole.

He felt something he’d never felt before, seeing this change in his Mama, and he watched her hands become suddenly soft and maternal again as they pressed gently against one another in front of her apron.

Daffyd Llewellyn saw a sudden sorrow in his Mama’s eyes, and he felt guilt.

Daffyd turned, ran:  he pounded across the bare ground in front of the house, he turned, curved, ran for the barn:  instinctively, he sought the familiar, and his hands closed around the longbow he’d fashioned from good Eastern elm:  he plucked the coiled, waxed bowstring from its peg and strung the bow without looking, without needing eyes:  the barn was dim, shadowed, it smelled of horses and of hay, and Daffyd slung the quiver over his shoulder.

He looked out the door, looked out at a long angle, frowned.

Something was there that shouldn’t be, and he didn’t recognize it at first.

He blinked to clear his eyes, looked again.

Silver … shiny … a button? – then it moved slightly and a billed cap came into focus, a military cap of some kind.

Daffyd was curious.

He slipped closer to the door, listened, then turned and looked to the back of the barn.

The cap was showing between two big rocks, rocks his Mama said she was going to have removed, and he’d asked why and she said it would be a hiding place in case someone wanted to shoot at them.

He had, of course, asked why anyone would want to shoot at them, and Sarah took him by the arms and said – quickly, intensely – “Daffyd, has anyone ever asked you about the Black Agent?”

Daffyd’s surprise was evident; he shook his head – “No, Mama, no one ever –“

“Has anyone asked about my wearing black?”  Sarah persisted.

“Mama, why are you asking me this?”

The conversation sailed through Daffyd’s mind as he slipped out the little back door, as he cat footed around above the barn, as he came into view of two men crouched behind the very rocks his Mama said would have to be blasted out of there.

“There she is,” one said, studying Daffyd’s Mama through a clumsy-looking set of binoculars, and the other raised a rifle, cheeking down against the stock as he settled his eye behind a tall, tang mounted peep sight.

Daffyd’s fingers closed around the bone nock of an arrow; he’d made all his own, he’d selected the wood for straight, dense grain, the heads were knapped flint, chipped with an antler shaper the way  his Mama showed him.

He drew the arrow quickly, released just as quickly, and the flint arrowhead penetrated the thin bone ahead of the shooter’s ear:  the man convulsed, fell back, his rifle falling barrel-up and then down between the rocks.

Daffyd loosed a second arrow – it was natural, it was muscle memory, it was with practiced ease that he nocked a second arrow and launched it as well.

The second man fell, the arrow projecting out his ear hole:  Daffyd though the other end might just be sticking out his far ear.

Daffyd Llewellyn looked at the two men he’d just killed, two men who were ready to do his Mama murder.

His hands clenched tight, one crushing-tight around the longbow’s wrapped handle, the other cranking down so tight he felt two knuckles pop.

“No one,” he said tightly, “no one shoots my Mama!”

Daffyd Llewellyn slung the bow over his back, almost ran to the murderer’s nest:  he snatched up the binoculars, the rifle, he ran toward his Mama, who was shading her eyes as he sprinted down over the bank and across the short grassy strip of meadow to her.

He stopped, breathing hard, thrust the still-cocked rifle into his Mama’s hands.

“Mama,” he said, his voice tight, “is this the reason you asked if anyone was asking me about the Black Agent?”

“Daffyd –“

“MAMA, WHY CAN’T YOU TRUST ME!” he flared, discharging the anger, the confusion, the unaccustomed distress like a storm-cloud discharging lightning’s bolt.

Sarah yanked the lever, dropped the loaded round to the ground:  “YOUNG MAN, DON’T YOU DARE SHOUT AT ME!”

“WHY DON’T YOU GO TO HELL!” Daffyd screamed, the cords standing out in his neck, and this time he wasn’t fast enough to avoid Sarah’s hard-swung palm.

He staggered back a couple of steps, hand to the side of his face, eyes wide, shocked:  Sarah’s eyes, as well, were wide, shocked, horrified at what she’d just done.

Daffyd ran into the house, ran through the open front door.

Sarah heard him pounding up the stone stairs.

She looked at the binoculars he’d dropped, she looked at the rifle in her hand, then she blinked and looked at the raised Vernier tang peep sight.

“Oh, God, no,” she whispered, her lips bloodless as she dipped her knees, snatched up the loaded round, dunked it into the rifle’s breech and snapped the lever shut:  she advanced on the two boulders, the two she’d meant to have blasted out of there.

Sarah saw the first man, with an arrow very precisely transfixing his head:  it went very exactly in one ear, and very precisely out the other:  the flint point was broken, probably when he fell.

The other man was dead as well, the arrow a little forward of the ear.

She looked at her front yard and realized her fears were realized.

Someone suspected she was the Black Agent.

Some criminal mind determined she was the one who’d cost them profit, and she was to be removed.

She’d asked Daffyd if anyone ever inquired about her, asked if she wore black, asked him anything about The Black Agent – and when he asked why, she balked, and this stung his youthful pride, and his angry reply flared her anger, and one thing built on another and she’d belted her son across the face right after he’d killed two men who very obviously were intent on killing her.

Sarah’s hand went to her mouth and for the first time in her life – for the very first time – she felt this terrible sense of loss, of helplessness, for she’d just done a terrible wrong to her son, when he had very obviously taken on the mark of Cain, in order to save his beloved mother’s life.

“Daffyd?”  she called, a quaver in her voice: “Daffyd, I’m sorry, I was wrong!”

She snatched her skirts with one hand, the other still gripping the rifle, and she ran down the bank and across the grassy strip, and into her fine stone home.

“Daffyd!”  she called.

The maid looked at her with sorrowful eyes.

It was the last time mother and son would ever see one another on this earth.

 

Some time later, the Sheriff rode out to see his daughter.

She’d taken to wearing mourning again, ever since her twelve year old son ran off, ran away to Cincinnati, hitching a ride with the Irish Brigade’s men who were on their one year cycle back to the great Porkopolis.  It was how Firelands kept its firemen trained – Cincinnati’s fire department was second only to Philadelphia’s, or maybe New York’s, but Cincinnati had a great advantage.

Ahrens had their manufactory in Cincinnati.

Ahrens made the very best fire engines.

Best in the world.

And the Cincinnati fire department used nothing but.

The Sheriff knew there had been something between his daughter and his grandson, but he also knew young men tend to be stiff-backed and prideful, and it wasn’t until Sarah asked him to ride with her, and she told him in a dry and emotionless voice just how much of a fool – how much of a damned fool – she’d been, and he listened patiently to her verbally flagellate herself, and he’d finally realized just why she wore mourning.

She’d driven her son away just as he’d done the best thing he ever could for his mother, he’d proven his worth and he’d proven he was worth her trust, and she couldn’t trust him with the truth about her being the Black Agent.

He’d heard her out, he’d held her hands and then held her to him and said in a soft and fatherly voice that young men are stiff necked and young men have an easily bruised ego and young men who run off generally come running back.

One week later he cracked the seal on a folded envelope and read a letter that wasn’t addressed to him.

He stopped halfway between Firelands and the fine stone house, he broke the seal and unfolded the missive and he read angry words written by a young man whose heart was broken, stomped on and crushed by a mother who should have been more than grateful.

Hateful words, written with the full force of Welsh eloquence and a betrayed child’s soul-deep pain.

Words he had to get out, but words that would pierce his little girl’s heart like the flint arrowheads that had stopped two men from doing murder.

The Sheriff read the letter, then folded it and slipped it into an inside coat pocket.

When he rode out to visit his daughter, Sarah asked hopefully if there was any mail, any word from her son Daffyd.

Sheriff Linn Keller smiled a little as he stroked her cheek with the back of a curled forefinger.

“Haven’t heard a thing,” he lied, and she believed him.

One and only one other soul on this earth knew of this letter.

The Sheriff leaned back against the bar, one boot up on the brass rail, a mug of beer in his hand as he looked out over the Silver Jewel.

He and Mr. Baxter spoke quietly, so only they could be heard:  no one else was anywhere in earshot, and the Sheriff confided in his old friend what had transpired.

Mr. Baxter nodded, and the Sheriff saw some ancient memory in the man’s eyes.

“You lied to your own daughter, about her own son.”

“Yep,” the Sheriff said shortly.

“You know,” Mr. Baxter said quietly, “God forgives us those lies.”

The Sheriff took a quiet pull on his beer.

“I’ve told such lies,” he said in a strained, hoarse voice, “not often, but when they were needful.  I told a widow woman her husband died quick and didn’t feel no pain.  He’d died screaming and begging us to make it stop and I lied to that woman.”  He closed his eyes, shivered.  “A man caught fire when a keg dumped over and sloshed him good with coal oil and then it hit a lantern and he burnt to death.  I told his son he was dead before the fire lit and he did not feel anything.”

“You lied to them.”

“You’re damned right I did.”

“Then you did the right thing.”

“Yeah.”  The Sheriff tilted the mug up, drained the beer, set the heavy glass tankard down on Mr. Baxter’s burnished mahogany bar top.  “That’s what I keep tellin’ myself.”

[Linn Keller, SASS 27332, BOLD 103]

34.  LADY IN BLACK

 

Why do these things always happen after dark?

Linn ho’d quietly to the gelding, and the Appaloosa ho’d, waiting patiently for the Sheriff to dismount and hang the reins over the hitch rail in front of the hospital.

Apple-horse was steady, Apple-horse was reliable, and Apple-horse was lazy:  as soon as the reins were carelessly tossed over the hitch rail, Apple affected his favorite posture:  hip shot, head down, standing up, asleep:  he’d been snoozing at this hitch rail when the squad came in, when police cars came whipping in, when a variety of panicked customers came screeching in, brakes locked, rubber screaming and horns blaring, and Apple-horse (at the very most) turned his ears toward the sound of the disturbance… otherwise, unflappable.

Linn tapped a four-digit code into the keypad, pulled the back hallway door open, strode into the lighted, polished hallway:  his boot heels were loud, for he strode with a businesslike pace, automatically falling into the military posture and pace that had been beat into his hard Celtic head in Basic.

He came around the corner, stopped, eyes hard.

His Uncle Will was coming out of the ICU, his jaw set, his uniform cap in his hand:  he was still in uniform, his shirt was crisply pressed, as were his trousers, and his Acme Wellingtons gleamed:  like all the men of his line, he preferred his boots shined.

He looked up at Linn.

The Sheriff stopped.

“You’d better go in,” Linn said quietly, and he saw his nephew’s jaw harden and thrust out a little.

 

“Nicodemus?”

Nicodemus groaned against the pain, barely able to move.

“Nicodemus?”

A hand … a warm hand, a woman’s hand, closing about his own.

His hand had been shredded, skinned, the nails sliced free and pulled out:  his hands were wrapped, his hands hurt like homemade hell …

The woman’s hand closed on his, and his hand didn’t hurt anymore.

The hand pulled, and he sat up, swung his legs over, stood.

He blinked, surprised.

“I don’t hurt,” he said, surprised, and looked at the quietly smiling woman.

He was wearing … something, he wasn’t sure what, but he was … dressed …

She was wearing full mourning, an old fashioned dress that looked really good on her –

“It’s a McKenna gown,” she smiled. 

“You heard me.”

He realized her mouth hadn’t moved, he hadn’t heard spoken words, he’d heard …

… her thoughts?

“Yes,” her voice whispered in his mind.  “My thoughts.”  She tilted her head, regarding him frankly, then she stepped to the side and something big and black and furry reared up and planted huge paws on his shoulders and laundered his face and ears with an enthusiastic abandon.

Nicodemus’ hands worked into warm and curly fur, laughing.

“Come over here,” the woman’s voice said, and he felt her hand on his arm:  she steered her and the happy, tail-swinging Bear Killer to the side, away from the bed.

The door thrust open and his Uncle Linn strode in, his eyes hard and his jaw set:  he looked ready to rip an anvil apart, barehand.

He took two long steps and stopped at the side of the bed just as the cardiac alarm went off.

Nicodemus blinked and The Bear Killer dropped down, planting his backside on the deck beside the woman’s left heel.

He looked over at the bed and realized it was occupied … there was someone in the bed, someone connected with multiple IVs, there were screens, there were little lights flashing.

He stepped over to the bed and looked more closely.

He didn’t recognize what he saw, not at first … it was heavily bandaged, what wasn’t bandaged was a pale and unhealthy color.

He looked up at the woman, surprised, almost shocked, and she nodded.

He looked up as the door slammed open and the Sheriff stepped back and the Code Blue team came in on a run, the big red Sears and Roebuck tool chest in tow.

The first nurse across the threshold was running backward, running easily as if she practiced (she did), and he saw her grip the paddles and pull them free of the clips, hit the thumb switches for final charge – he heard the capacitors begin their rising whistle as they charged and prepared for the countershock’s electric thunderclap of a discharge.

The woman turned him, gloved hands warm on his cheeks:  “You have to choose,” she whispered, her voice fierce, intent.

“Choose what?”

He looked at the bed, at the grim expression on his Uncle’s face, at the way Linn’s hands closed into fists – tight, quivering, controlled, enraged.

He watched as the Code Blue team worked their magic, listened to taut and professional voices giving orders, not wanting to believe what he was realizing.

“That’s me,” he whispered.  “If that’s me … what am I doing standing here?”

His head snapped around as the doctor’s quiet, professional voice said, “Call it.”

Nicodemus swallowed and his hand gripped the woman’s hand like an uncertain little boy holding his Mama’s hand.

The room misted into fog and solidified again and they were standing on the main street of Firelands, but not the Firelands he knew.

He took a step backward and bumped into something solid … he put a hand back, then he turned, frowned, curious, raised his hand, touched the smooth, weathered wood …

… logs? …

“Yes, logs,” the woman said, and this time he heard her spoken voice.

He turned, frowning a little, curious, and the woman laughed, a happy, giggling, almost girlish laugh, her gloved hand up over her lips.  “I’m sorry,” she giggled, “you look so much like my Papa and you sound like my late husband!”

Nicodemus shook his head.  “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m confused here.  What’s going on?”

“You’re dying,” a man’s voice said, a strong, confident voice:  he turned and a tall man in a red, bib front shirt with a gold-embroidered Maltese cross on its front, seized his hand, grinning.  “Daffyd Llewellyn.  I’m her late husband.”

“Her late husband.”

“Yes.”  The woman smiled, took the man’s arm, looked up at him with an adoring expression, then she looked back at Nicodemus.  “He died saving a child from a house fire, and I died saving my little girl.”

“So I’m dead.”

“Almost.”

Nicodemus laughed.  “What do you mean, almost dead?”

“It hasn’t happened yet.  You have a choice.”

“If I have a choice, how is it I’m here?  Is my body so bad that I take it off like a dirty shirt?”

Daffyd Llewellyn clapped a manly hand on Nicodemus’ shoulder, his laughter booming across the street.  “By Boadicea’s chariot, he sounds like his father!”

“He sounds like my father, I’ll grand you,” the woman smiled.

“How … what happens if I decide to live?”

“You’ll go back into your body,” Daffyd Llewellyn explained.  “You’ll have to heal from all your injuries.  You’ll have to fight infection, you’ll … it’ll be like you were burned.”

“Burned?”

“You were skinned alive,” the woman explained.  “And you’ll have to learn to use a white cane.”

Nicodemus stared at her. 

“Blind?”

“They cut your eyes out,” the woman said flatly, “among other … parts.”

Nicodemus’ jaw thrust out slowly.

He turned as a slow, deliberate pair of boots came up from behind.

He turned to see a tall man with an iron-grey mustache and an irritated expression, dragging two men by their throats.

Each man had an arrow through his head.

“You won’t go alone,” the hard-eyed man rumbled and Nicodemus blinked, surprised.

“Uncle Linn?”

“I’m not your uncle.”  He dropped the carcasses.  “These two cut you up.”

“How’d … did you kill them?”

“No.”

“Your uncle,” the woman in black explained.  “This is …”

She released her husband’s arm, went around, took the older man’s arm, smiling.  “This is my Papa.”

“You two haven’t been introduced, have you?”  the older man with the iron grey mustache rumbled.

Nicodemus shook his head slowly.

“This is my little girl.  Her name’s Sarah Lynne McKenna.  You might know her as the Black Agent.  You already met Daffyd Llewellyn.”

“We’ve met,” Nicodemus said faintly.

Nicodemus looked at Sarah, blinking, and Sarah laughed a little as the realization filled his eyes.

“Yes,” she laughed, “I look like Willamina.”

“Aunt Willa never wore black.”

“Actually she did, but you weren’t there for the funeral,” Sarah corrected gently. 

Nicodemus looked around, looked back. 

“Is Aunt Willa coming?”

Sarah and the Old Sheriff laughed.  “She’s busy already,” Sarah said, shaking her head.  “I think –“

She looked up and Daffyd put his finger to his lips.

“That’s right,” Sarah laughed.  “I’m not supposed to tell.”

“Is this the afterlife?”

“No.”  Sarah paced up to Nicodemus, took both his hands.  “No, this is to help you get your balance.”

“And to keep you safe,” Daffyd spoke up.

“Safe?  From what?”

Sarah reached over her shoulder, brought out a curved, very sharp blade.  “There are … predators … who like to devour souls.”  Her smile was tight and less than entirely pleasant.  “Do you remember reading in Scripture that we are surrounded by a great cloud of believers?”

Nicodemus nodded, slowly.

“Well,” Sarah smiled, spinning the blade in a quick figure-eight, “here we are!”

Nicodemus blinked again, and he was in the hospital room, and both the Old Sheriff, Sarah, and her husband Daffyd were there with him.

“You have to decide,” Sarah whispered, and Nicodemus saw a dark figure uncoil and stand in the corner.

Sarah and the Old Sheriff stepped to the bed, the lawman cocking an engraved Colt, Sarah drawing a second blade.

Neither spoke.

Neither moved.

The demonic shadow backed away, and disappeared into the wall.

Nicodemus looked at his body, looked at the old lawman, looked at the woman in mourning black, looked at the red-shirted fireman.

“Did they come after you when you died?”  he asked.

Daffyd laughed.  “They did,” he admitted.

“What did you do?”

“I was surrounded with fire, and fire is their element, so I took an inch-and-a-half straight-tip and hit them in the belly with a straight stream of good cold cistern water at a hundred twenty pounds’ pressure!”  He laughed.  “They didn’t like that!”

“You?”  He turned to the Old Sheriff.

“They tried,” he said shortly, and did not elaborate.

Nicodemus couldn’t help but think there was a fight involved, and without going into details, he was right.

 

One of the EMTs on his cardiac refresher rotation was kneeling on the bed, hands folded on the patient’s chest.

The EMT was good at CPR, the EMT was experienced and well-practiced, and the EMT chanted quietly with his compressions:  “One-and-two-and-three-and-four-are five, one-and-two-and-three-and-four-and-five –“

“Stop compressions.”

The EMT leaned back, dropped his feet to the floor, straightened, grateful for the respite.

“Time to choose,” Sarah whispered.

Nicodemus looked at the still figure, he flowed into the body, a little, just a little, and felt the horrible injuries, the crippling injuries, tasted how dimly the life force flickered, deep inside … and he withdrew, shaking his head.

“I can’t,” he whispered.  “I can’t go back.”

Sarah took his hand, the Old Sheriff gripped his shoulder.

“You’re making the right choice,” the pale eyed lawman rumbled reassuringly.

The doctor looked at the green trace crossing the EKG screen.

His fingers probed gently beside the patient’s trachea, one of the only skin surfaces not devastated by the flaying blade.

The pulse he sought was not there; the EKG showed no electrical activity.

Nicodemus realized he was holding his breath.

“Time of death … zero-four-forty-five.”

He watched as the Code Blue team broke down the equipment and rolled out of the room, as the doctor paced on silent crepe soles over to the Sheriff, shook the hard-faced man’s hand and gave his quiet voiced condolences.

Nicodemus watched as everyone left the room, everyone but his Uncle.

Linn took a long breath, paced slowly across the floor.

Nicodemus watched as his uncle bent over, arms crossed on the dead man’s chest, shoulders heaving:  he felt the man’s jaws clench, heard the muffled, choking sobs, and he saw his Uncle’s soul straighten up, arms in the air, fists clenched, and he heard his Uncle’s soul scream with grief and with loss and with utter, absolute rage, then the Sheriff’s essence bent back over and re-entered his grieving body.

“Come with me,” the woman whispered, and they turned, and they were gone.

Chief of Police Will Keller stood as Sheriff Linn Keller came out of the ICU suite.

Uncle and Nephew looked at one another.

Linn cleared his throat.

“He’s dead,” the Sheriff said, and his uncle nodded, his expression hardening.

“I’ll arrange the funeral.”

“Obliged.”

The two men stood, turning their hats slowly in their hands.

“Uncle Will?”

Uncle Will looked up, one eyebrow rising a little.

“I’ve known men try to put their fist through a wall.”

Will nodded.

“Generally it ain’t the wall that comes out in second place.”

Will nodded again.

Linn turned and looked at the closed door, then reached into his watch pocket and pulled out a gold coin, a coin with a rose on one side and the Seal of Solomon superimposed with the Christian cross on the other.

He drew it out just far enough for his Uncle Will to see it.

“He’s gone, but he will not stand before the Throne alone.”

Uncle Will nodded, reached into his own watch pocket, withdrew a matching coin, just a little, just enough to be seen.

“And when I die, may I stand before the Throne with a smoking empty pistol in one hand, a bloody knife in the other and my boot on the neck of my enemy.”